On the morning of Saturday, December 14th, 1991, a sixteen-year-old girl in a blue drill team uniform drove into the back parking lot of Federal Way High School, south of Seattle, Washington. She was in a hurry. She thought she was late. Her team was supposed to gather at the school and take a bus north to a competition, and she did not want to be the one who kept everyone waiting.

She was not late. She was about an hour early. She parked her father’s white car in the lot. No one saw her get out of it.

A little after nine, two boys, one twelve and one thirteen, took a shortcut across the school grounds on their way to go skateboarding. As they passed a brushy slope near the tennis courts, they saw a man stand up out of the bushes. He walked away ahead of them in the same direction they were going. They did not think much of it at first.

Then they went into the brush where he had been. The girl they found there was Sarah Yarborough. She was a junior, an honor student, a ballet dancer, a girl who always seemed to have a book in her hand. She had been strangled with her own nylons less than three hundred feet from her car.

The boys had seen the man’s face. A jogger who passed the slope that morning had seen him, too, kneeling over a girl on the ground, and had kept running, thinking they were a young couple. Police drew sketches from what the witnesses described. They collected the killer’s DNA.

Over the years, they received about four thousand tips. They took DNA from nearly a hundred men. None of them was the man in the bushes. For almost twenty-eight years, the man who killed Sarah Yarborough lived in the same part of King County.

He had a history that should have put him at the top of any list of suspects. He had attacked women before, and he had been in prison for it. On the morning Sarah died, he was on parole. And yet his DNA had never been entered into the national database, and his name never came up.

It would take a genealogist, a family tree that reached back to the Mayflower, a pair of brothers, and two cigarette butts dropped outside a laundromat to bring that man into a courtroom. Sarah Louise Yarborough was born in Portland, Oregon in June 1975. When she was about eight, her family moved north to Federal Way, Washington. Her parents, Tom and Laura, both worked for Weyerhaeuser, the timber and paper company whose headquarters stood in Federal Way.

Sarah had two brothers, Micah and Andrew. She was the only daughter. Federal Way in the early 1990s was a growing suburb on the road between Seattle and Tacoma. It had grown up along Pacific Highway South, the old main road between the two cities, with shopping centers, apartment complexes, and subdivisions spreading out among the evergreens.

Federal Way High School sat just west of the highway, a few blocks north of the SeaTac Mall. It had about twelve hundred students. Around the edges of the campus were parking lots, tennis courts, and slopes covered with tall trees and thick brush. Sarah’s friends remembered her as one of the kindest people they knew.

Christy Carson had been her friend since the third grade, from the year the Yarboroughs arrived in town. The two of them had been in Camp Fire together. “I don’t think she ever did a mean thing to anybody in the entire world,” Christy said. “She was always there for you when you were down.

”

Sarah loved to dance. She studied ballet through Camp Fire. She performed with a group called the Safety Kids, a youth dance troupe that traveled with a message against drugs and alcohol. In the summer of 1991, she went with them all the way to New Zealand.

She was a strong student, the kind who earned top grades without seeming to strain. She loved to read. She loved art and museums. She loved to travel.

She had big plans. She wanted to go to college, and she wanted to see the world. Her family belonged to Bible Baptist Church in Auburn, and Sarah was active in its youth group. Jean Papino, the youth pastor, knew her well.

“She was one of those model kids,” he said. “She really had everything going for her. ”

At school, Sarah was the student who ran into her sixth-period chemistry class just as the bell rang. Her teacher, Ingred Leiden, remembered it years later with a kind of fondness.

“Sarah was always racing in at the last second,” Leiden said, “and I never marked her tardy. ”

Her classmates remembered her smile. One of them, Len Badgely, liked to tease her by putting her in the spotlight just to watch her blush. “You’d get that smile,” he said.

Another classmate said that her smile could light up a whole room. Neighbors who knew the family described her as a magical person with a magnetic personality. That school year, Sarah joined the Federal Way High School drill team. It was something new for her, a way to combine her love of dance with the life of the school.

The team performed precision routines at games and traveled to competitions against teams from other schools. On Friday night, December 13th, Sarah went to a basketball game with Christy Carson and other friends. She was excited, Christy remembered, about the competition the next day. Sarah’s parents were away that weekend at Ocean Shores on the Washington coast.

The drill team was scheduled to gather at the high school between nine and nine-thirty on Saturday morning. From there, a bus would take them to a competition at Wanita High School in Kirkland, on the other side of Seattle. That morning, Sarah put on her uniform, a blue skirt and sweater. She took her father’s car and drove the short distance to school.

She was sure she was running late. She arrived a little after eight. The parking lot was nearly empty. The rest of the team would not be there for another hour.

What happened in the minutes after she parked is something no one saw. Investigators would later say they would never know how the encounter began. What they do know is where it ended. Somehow Sarah was taken from the area near her car into the trees and brush on the slope by the tennis courts, out of sight of the lot.

Sometime that morning, a man running along the edge of the campus glanced toward the slope. He saw a girl lying on the ground, not moving, and a man kneeling over her. He assumed they were a couple, two teenagers making out in the bushes. He kept jogging.

Shortly after nine, the two boys came across the campus on their way to skateboard. One of them, Andrew Miller, would describe what they saw more than thirty years later in a courtroom. A man, he said, stood up in the bushes. The man walked away ahead of the boys, going the same way they were.

They noticed him, but they were boys on a Saturday morning with other things on their minds. Then they reached the place where the man had been. Sarah was lying in the brush. She was still in her drill team uniform, but her clothing had been disturbed, and some of it lay in a pile in the grass nearby.

She was dead. The boys ran home and told their parents. Their parents called 911. The first officer to arrive at Federal Way High School that morning was John Matson of the King County Police, who would later rise to the rank of major.

The body was found at around nine-fifteen or nine-twenty in the morning. Within a short time, the brushy slope was full of police. Officers taped off an area about half the size of a football field. The drill team members began arriving for their bus.

Sarah’s car was in the lot, but Sarah was not there. The competition in Kirkland was cancelled. So was every other activity at the school that weekend, including the boys’ and girls’ basketball games. Michael Hatch, a King County homicide detective, was one of the first investigators on the scene.

He paid close attention to Sarah’s hands. There might be some DNA under her fingernails. He would later say it was not a guarantee, but there was certainly a potential for it. He was right.

Sarah had injuries to her face. Her legs were scratched and dirty. Under her fingernails, investigators would eventually find a man’s DNA. Sarah had fought him.

In the words prosecutors would use decades later, “She fought for her life. ”

The medical examiner determined that she had been strangled. The ligature was a pair of her own nylons. Prosecutors would later say she was killed during a sexual assault, and the man had left semen on her clothing.

In 1991, DNA testing was still new in criminal cases, but investigators preserved the evidence. It would one day give them a full genetic profile of the man who killed her. At first, the medical examiner’s office would not even release Sarah’s name. Major Bob Evans of the Federal Way precinct told reporters that she had probably died less than an hour before she was found.

That fit what the witnesses described. Sarah had arrived just after eight. She was found a little after nine. Everything that happened to her had happened in that hour, within sight of a parking lot in the middle of a school campus on a Saturday morning.

Tom and Laura Yarborough came home from the coast to the worst news parents can receive. Their pastor, Jean Papino, spent the evening with them. The witnesses gave the police what they could. The man the boys saw was white, probably in his late teens or twenties.

He was around six feet tall. He had shaggy, dirty blonde hair that reached about to his shoulders. He may have had acne. A forensic artist worked with the boys and the jogger to create a composite sketch, and the police released it to the public.

Copies went up all over Federal Way. Across the area, the news reached families in pieces. Janelle Hopkins, a senior that year, was driving to work on the other side of the high school that morning. Her mother called her in a panic, needing to know she was safe.

All over Federal Way, parents were making the same calls. The sketch would become the face of the case for the next twenty-seven years. Federal Way was frightened. If a girl could be killed on her own high school campus in daylight, with her teammates about to arrive, then nowhere felt safe.

Parents set earlier curfews. Families double-bolted their doors. Children walked in groups. At the high school, members of the football and wrestling teams organized themselves to walk girls to and from their cars before and after school.

The school brought in a team of crisis counselors for its twelve hundred students. Superintendent Richard Harris said the counselors would help the school get back to normal, “if there is such a thing as normalcy” after an episode like this. On the Monday after the murder, Sarah’s classmates came back to empty chairs. Bill Harris, one of her teachers, would later call it the hardest day of his teaching career.

He rearranged the seats in his classroom so that there would be no empty place where she had sat. In Ingred Leiden’s chemistry class, the students made a different choice. They voted to keep Sarah’s seat, and they did not change the seating chart. Thyra Pearson, a Federal Way High School student of that era, would say decades later that the day had defined her whole generation at the school.

She compared it to the Challenger disaster and to the attacks of September 11th, 2001. “This defined us,” she said. “This shifted us. This changed who we became that day.

”

Another young man who grew up in the area and never met Sarah would explain what the murder did to him as a boy. He had thought the world was full of roses. He said, “When we found out about this, that was the first time I understood there’s evil and hate in the world. ”

Sarah’s closest friends grieved not only for her but for what came after.

One of them, Michelle Maddox, would later say that the school was not ready for what followed. There were photographers. There were students who even blamed Sarah for what had happened to her. Michelle lost her best friend, and then had to keep losing her again and again for years.

Meanwhile, the King County police threw everything they had at the case. Detective Susan Peters became the lead detective. In the first weeks, the department dedicated enormous resources to the investigation. Detectives interviewed people who had been near the school that morning.

They looked at known sex offenders. They followed tips from the public. They asked men who might be connected to the case to give samples so their DNA could be compared with the profile from the scene. Some of the men took polygraph tests.

But a homicide unit cannot keep every detective on one case forever. As time went on, Peters would later explain, “Detectives go off the case because they have their own homicide cases. They have their own robbery cases. The investigation slowed.

It did not stop. ”

One detective in particular refused to let it go. His name was Jim Doyon, and he worked the Yarborough case from the day of the murder. In the fall of 1993, nearly two years after the killing, Doyon was going back through the old file.

He came across a statement that one of the students had given police in 1991. The boy had been dropped off at the school that morning by his mother. Doyon realized that no one had ever interviewed the mother. He found her and talked to her in October 1993.

She remembered something. When she dropped off her son that morning at about the same time she saw Sarah arrive, she had noticed an old station wagon parked near a gate in the school’s north parking lot. Doyon wanted more detail. He arranged for the woman to be questioned under hypnosis, a technique some police departments used at the time to try to help witnesses recall what they had seen.

Under hypnosis, she described the car as a midsize station wagon about thirty years old, with faded white paint and many spots of rust or primer. The detail fit with what her son and two other students had told police back in 1991. A few minutes after the woman dropped off her son, they had seen a similar station wagon, now parked right beside Sarah’s car. It had moved about forty feet from the gate to the spot next to hers.

When police arrived after the body was found, the station wagon was gone. No one had seen anyone inside the car. No one had written down the license plate. Doyon had already checked the 514 cars that had parking permits at the school.

None of them was a station wagon like the one the woman described. In February 1994, the police made the new clue public. The car belonged either to a witness who left the scene, Doyon told the Seattle Times, or to a possible suspect. The station wagon was never found.

The years went on. By the early 2000s, investigators had followed more than three thousand leads. Nearly a hundred men gave samples. One after another, the samples were compared with the profile from Sarah’s clothing.

And one after another, the men were eliminated. The police checked the profile against CODIS, the FBI’s national DNA database. Again and again, there was never a match. CODIS was built mainly from the DNA of people convicted of crimes and of people arrested for certain offenses, depending on the state and the year.

The theory behind it was simple. A man who would do something like this had very likely done something like it before. And if he had been convicted, his DNA should be in the system. The theory was right.

The man who killed Sarah had done things like it before, more than once. He had been convicted. He had been to prison. But his DNA was not in the system.

For Sarah’s family, the years after December 1991 were a kind of blur. Laura Yarborough would later say that there were three years that were simply blank for her and her husband, years she could barely remember. A neighbor would later write about seeing Laura go into Sarah’s empty bedroom. “Our lives,” Laura said, “went from full color to a fuzzy gray.

”

Sarah’s brother, Micah, was hit especially hard. For years, he struggled with his mental health. The man who had taken his sister had a face that existed only in a pencil sketch. Every December 14th, the anniversary came around again.

Classmates who had graduated and moved away thought of her every December. Michael Hatch, the detective who had stood over Sarah’s body that morning and noticed her hands, began lighting a candle for her on that date every year. He still does, long after his retirement. At Federal Way High School, Sarah was not forgotten.

A memorial was built on the campus. It took the form of a bench, and with it were things that told the story of who she had been: a backpack, books, a pair of ballet slippers, a necktie, and a dog. On the bench were two words: Carpe Diem. Seize the day.

Years passed. The students who had known Sarah grew up and had children of their own. Some of them would later say that what happened that morning had shaped how they raised those children, how carefully they watched them, how much they worried. The police kept the case open.

Detectives retired, and new ones took over the file. The DNA profile sat in the system, and every so often it was run again. It never matched. But while the Yarborough case sat still, the science of DNA was moving.

In 2011, a King County detective named Jim Allen reached out to a woman named Colleen Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick was an unusual figure in forensic science. She was a physicist by training, with a doctorate, who had become fascinated by genealogy and by what DNA could reveal about family history. She ran a company called Identifinders International, and she had become one of the early pioneers of a new idea: that the DNA left at a crime scene might be used not just to match a known person, but to trace the family of an unknown one.

At the time, the methods were still primitive by later standards. In 2011 and 2012, Fitzpatrick analyzed the killer’s Y chromosome. The Y chromosome is passed from father to son nearly unchanged down through the generations, along with the family surname in most western families. By comparing the Y-DNA from the crime scene with genealogy databases, it is sometimes possible to predict the surname of the man who left it.

The analysis pointed to the surname Fuller. According to CBS News, Fitzpatrick traced the paternal line back to a man named Robert Fuller, whose family had come to America on the Mayflower in 1620. It was the first real break in the case in twenty years, and it was also a puzzle. Nearly four centuries had passed since the Mayflower.

A surname does not always follow the Y chromosome. Children are adopted. Names change. A man who carries the genetic signature of the Fuller line might carry a completely different last name.

The Fuller lead narrowed the possibilities, but it did not name anyone. In 2012, armed with the new information about the killer’s ancestry, the sheriff’s office renewed its public appeal for help. That same year, in January 2012, a memorial plaque honoring Sarah was placed at Federal Way High School. The appeal brought more tips.

None of them led to the killer. In February 2018, the King County Sheriff’s Office tried something new. A company in Virginia called Parabon Nanolabs had developed a way to predict a person’s appearance from their DNA. By reading genetic markers linked to traits like eye color, hair color, skin tone, and the shape of the face, Parabon could produce a composite image of an unknown person.

The method is called DNA phenotyping. It cannot tell investigators exactly what someone looks like, but it can give them a scientifically based estimate. The sheriff’s office sent the DNA from Sarah’s case to Parabon. The company produced images of what the killer might have looked like at eighteen, at twenty-five, and in the present day.

The sheriff’s office released them to the public. Captain Ted Boe of the sheriff’s office compared the Parabon images with the original sketches drawn from the witnesses in 1991. “You can tell it’s the same person,” he said. “The witnesses saw the right guy.

”

Jim Allen had retired from the sheriff’s office by then, but he was still working on the case. He hoped the new images would jog someone’s memory. “We’re hoping to get that one phone call,” he said. “It’s going to take one good tip.

”

The new images brought in more tips. Once again, none of them named the killer. But something else was happening in 2018 that would change everything. In April of that year, investigators in California arrested a man they said was the Golden State Killer, a serial rapist and murderer who had terrorized the state in the 1970s and 1980s.

They had found him by a method that had never been used that way before. They uploaded crime scene DNA to a public genealogy website, GEDmatch, where people who had taken consumer DNA tests could share their results to find relatives. The killer’s DNA matched distant cousins. Genealogists built family trees from those cousins until they narrowed the possibilities to one man.

Within months, police departments across the country were using the same technique, now called investigative genetic genealogy. Cases that had been cold for decades began to fall, one after another. In King County, the lead detective on the Yarborough case was now Kathleen Decker. In 2018, she hired Colleen Fitzpatrick again, this time to use the newest DNA technology and the growing genealogy databases to try to identify the man who killed Sarah.

The work was slow. Fitzpatrick and her team, which included genealogists Gretchen Stack and Holly Turk, compared the crime scene DNA with the profiles of people who had shared their DNA in genealogy databases. They found relatives of the killer. They built family trees.

They followed branches that went nowhere. There were false starts, names that looked promising until they were eliminated. On September 27th, 2019, Fitzpatrick called Detective Decker. She had, in Decker’s words, “a promising lead on this case.

”

The genealogy had narrowed the search to a single family, and within that family to two brothers, both living in King County. Both brothers were descendants of the Fuller line, and both of them had records as sex offenders. Their names were Edward Nicholas and Patrick Nicholas. Edward Nicholas, the older brother, had a prior rape conviction.

Because of it, his DNA was already in CODIS. Detectives compared it with the profile from Sarah’s clothing. It did not match. Edward was eliminated.

That left Patrick. Patrick Leon Nicholas was fifty-five years old in 2019. He lived in Covington, a small city in southeast King County, where for several years he had lived in a run-down building on a large piece of property. In December 1991, he had been twenty-seven years old, and he had lived in the area around Federal Way.

Investigators would learn that around the time of the murder, he often rode a bus route that passed by Federal Way High School. When detectives pulled his record, they found a history that matched the crime almost exactly. In 1980, when he was sixteen years old, Patrick Nicholas was convicted in King County of two counts of first-degree rape. He had raped two women at knifepoint, and he had tried to rape a third.

The pattern in those attacks was the same. He approached women near their cars, started a conversation, then pulled a knife, ordered them to undress, and forced them to a secluded place. He was sent to a juvenile treatment facility. By 1983, he had been released.

That year, he was in Richland, in eastern Washington. In June 1983, a twenty-one-year-old woman named Anne Crony drove to a park along the Columbia River in Richland. She wanted some time to think by the water. She was sitting on the hood of her car when a young man walked up and started a conversation.

He told her his name was Pat Nicholas. At some point, she asked him whether he had been water-skiing on the river. He told her he couldn’t swim. As they talked, his voice became shaky, and Anne grew uncomfortable.

She got into the driver’s seat of her car. As she tried to start the engine, he came around to the driver’s side and put a knife to her throat. He ordered her to take off her clothes. He gagged her so she could not scream.

Then he began walking her down toward a secluded spot along the riverbank. Halfway down, Anne remembered what he had told her. He couldn’t swim. She broke away from him and dove into the Columbia River.

She swam out as far as she could. “I swam for my life,” she would later say. “I swam harder than I ever had before. ”

She escaped.

Nicholas left the state, but he was arrested. He pleaded guilty to attempted first-degree rape. In custody, he told police that he realized he had a problem concerning raping girls and that he wanted help. Anne spoke at his sentencing.

The judge gave him the maximum term, ten years in prison, and believed that meant he would be locked away for ten years. He was not. Washington’s prison system released him on parole after about three and a half years, in 1987. His prison file noted no major infractions and no drug or alcohol problem.

One evaluation said he could safely be at large as long as he stayed in a therapeutic relationship and remained under parole supervision. He was released with the understanding that he would attend an outpatient treatment program for sex offenders. Prosecutors would later point out what that early release meant. If Nicholas had served his full ten-year sentence, he would not have been released until after Sarah Yarborough’s high school graduation.

Instead, on the morning of December 14th, 1991, he was on parole. In 1993, less than two years after Sarah’s murder, Nicholas was arrested again, this time on a charge of first-degree assault involving child molestation. The charge was reduced. He pleaded guilty to fourth-degree assault, a gross misdemeanor.

Five known prior sexual offenses. A prison sentence for attempted rape. A parole that was still running when Sarah was killed. And yet, at no point had the law required Nicholas to give a DNA sample.

His profile was never entered into CODIS. When detectives ran the DNA from Sarah’s clothing through the database again and again for twenty-eight years, the man who left it was simply not there to be found. Now detectives had his name. They needed his DNA.

Investigators can’t simply demand a DNA sample from someone who has not been charged. But under the law, people give up any expectation of privacy in things they throw away. So detectives did what investigators in many cold cases have done. They watched him, and they waited for him to throw something away.

The surveillance lasted about two days. At one point, an undercover investigator walked up to Nicholas and asked him for directions. Then detectives followed him to a laundromat in Kent, in a strip mall. They watched him smoke two cigarettes outside.

They watched him drop a paper napkin. When he left, he left the cigarette butts on the ground. The investigators collected all three items and sent them to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab. On October 2nd, 2019, the lab reported its result.

The DNA on one of the cigarettes matched the DNA from Sarah Yarborough’s clothing. That same day, detectives arrested Patrick Nicholas at a business in Kent. He went without a struggle. Detectives served a search warrant at his home.

Among his belongings, they found a torn magazine photo of a woman in a cheerleading outfit. And they found a newspaper from 1994 with a front-page article about the Yarborough case. Nicholas was booked into the King County Jail that night. His bail was set at five million dollars.

The next day, October 3rd, prosecutors charged him with first-degree murder. On Thursday, October 3rd, 2019, the King County Sheriff’s Office held a press conference. Sheriff Mitzi Johanknecht announced the arrest. She said that there are few things in law enforcement more rewarding than telling a parent that you believe you have solved the murder of their child.

Detective Decker described the case. She said that about four thousand tips had come in over the years. The public had helped, she said, but none of the tips had identified the man who was arrested. As far as investigators could tell, Nicholas had no connection to Sarah at all.

She was a stranger to him. Then Laura Yarborough stepped up to speak. She thanked the detectives. They had never given up, she said, even when she had.

She said she still felt a little numb, and she expected other feelings to come. She described her daughter the way she wanted the world to remember her. Sarah had been an excellent student, Laura said, who always had a book in her hand and who was excited about going to college. She loved life.

She loved people. She loved to travel. And then she said something meant for anyone who might be thinking of doing what Patrick Nicholas had done. “If you’re going to do something heinous,” she said, “don’t do it here, because they’ll come to get you.

”

Across Federal Way and far beyond it, the news spread. Sarah’s friends from 1991 were now in their forties. They reached out to each other on social media. Old friends reconnected.

Mary Beth Thome, who had known Sarah since childhood, said she started crying when she heard about the arrest. “That sketch,” she said, “kind of lived in my head like this boogeyman. ”

Matt Priestman, who also knew Sarah, said the arrest brought it all back. “It was almost like it happened again,” he said.

Catching him, he added, “doesn’t necessarily bring peace to the whole thing. Sarah’s still gone, and we still miss her. ”

On Friday, October 11th, 2019, about twenty people gathered at Sarah’s memorial bench at Federal Way High School before a football game. Former classmates, neighbors, and teachers came.

They brought bouquets of flowers. Thyra McKelvie, who had been Thyra Pearson in 1991 and who organized the gathering, said that people had been reliving it all week. “We’re just forever united,” she said. “It shook all of us to our core.

And it was the day that forever changed our safety and our security. ”

Julie Hagen, who graduated in the class of 1992, remembered what it had been like to learn that the girl killed at her school was Sarah. “It was torture,” she said. “Even now, every December, you kind of think about it.

” When she heard about the arrest, she said she had chills. “It was a wave of relief. Then came the anger. It affected me more than I thought it would.

I’m glad it’s finally over and that Sarah’s family has closure. ”

One of the people at the bench that night had never met Sarah at all. It was Colin Sawyer, the boy who had learned from her murder that there was evil in the world. He had gone to nearby Decatur High School, and for twenty-six years he had coached boys’ basketball in the Federal Way School District.

Whenever his team played at Federal Way High School, he brought flowers to Sarah’s memorial, and he told his players her story. Ingred Leiden was still teaching at Federal Way High School. It was her thirty-third year. She still checked on Sarah’s memorial.

In eastern Washington, someone else heard the news. In 2019, detectives contacted Anne Crony. They told her that the man who had held a knife to her throat on the banks of the Columbia River in 1983 had been arrested for the murder of a sixteen-year-old girl. “I was crushed,” Anne said.

It had never occurred to her, she said, that what she escaped from was a murderer. She had believed for thirty-six years that he had stayed in prison for the full ten years. Now she learned he had been released early, and that he had been free on parole when Sarah was killed. “The system failed,” she said.

“It really failed. He should have been locked up. ”

Patrick Nicholas pleaded not guilty. His case took more than three years to reach trial.

Washington had abolished the death penalty in 2018, when the state supreme court struck it down as unconstitutional. The most serious charge Nicholas faced, premeditated first-degree murder, carried a mandatory sentence of life in prison. His lawyers decided to put the new science itself on trial. In a brief filed before trial, the defense argued that the police had turned to a hobbyist to find their suspect.

Colleen Fitzpatrick, they said, was not a trained geneticist or a population statistician. They claimed she had hoped to win grants and prizes by solving the case. They pointed out that she had produced false leads before she reached Nicholas. And they argued that the genealogical method she used had not been studied enough to be considered reliable.

In February 2023, the defense filed a motion challenging the reliability of the DNA statistics. The court rejected it. The genealogy was only how detectives had found Nicholas’s name. It was not the evidence that would convict him.

That evidence was the DNA itself: the direct comparison between the crime scene DNA and the DNA on the cigarette Nicholas threw away. Pre-trial motions began on March 23rd, 2023, in King County Superior Court in Kent. Judge Josephine Wiggs presided. Jury selection took a long time.

Opening statements began in April. The prosecutor was senior deputy prosecutor Mary Barbosa. She told the jury how Sarah had come to school early, how she had been taken into the brush, how she had fought, and how she had died. The state’s DNA evidence was overwhelming.

The jury heard that the chance that a random unrelated person would match the DNA profile from the crime scene was about one in 120 quadrillion. New testing on the material from under Sarah’s fingernails also pointed to Nicholas. The jury saw the physical evidence from that December morning. Sarah’s sweatshirt, her skirt, her socks, her hair curlers, and the pair of pantyhose that detectives said was used to strangle her.

They heard from the men who had been there in 1991. John Matson described arriving as the first officer on the scene. Michael Hatch described how the evidence was collected and why he had thought to look under Sarah’s fingernails. Susan Peters, the original lead detective, described the early investigation and how the case had gone cold.

And they heard from Andrew Miller, who had been thirteen years old on the morning he and his friend cut across the school grounds. He was now a grown man. He told the jury what he had seen that morning: the man rising from the brush and walking away ahead of them. The defense attorney, David Montes, told the jury that Patrick Nicholas was not the person who killed Sarah Yarborough.

He argued that Nicholas did not match the descriptions the witnesses had given in 1991. The witnesses had described a man with acne or acne scars, he said, and Nicholas had neither. He argued that detectives had rushed to accept the word of an untrained genealogist who had pointed them toward other suspects before Nicholas. He questioned the old investigation, too, asking about the polygraphs that had been used to clear suspects and about the detective who had hypnotized witnesses.

Nicholas did not testify. The trial lasted about two and a half weeks, with nine days of testimony. Closing arguments ended on May 3rd. The jury began deliberating on May 9th.

The next day, on Wednesday, May 10th, 2023, after about a day and a half of deliberation, the jury returned its verdict. They found Patrick Nicholas not guilty of premeditated first-degree murder. Some of the jurors could not agree that he had planned the killing in advance. But they found him guilty of first-degree felony murder, meaning he had killed Sarah in the course of another serious felony.

They found him guilty of second-degree murder. And on both counts, they returned a special verdict that the murder was committed with sexual motivation. One juror, Shaun Gapay, later told the Federal Way Mirror that he was not satisfied with that part of the verdict. As for the defense’s long attack on Colleen Fitzpatrick and her methods, he said it had not mattered to the jury.

The genealogy had only pointed to a name. The DNA had done the rest. After thirty-one years, a jury had put a name to the face in the 1991 sketch. Sarah’s mother had waited a long time for that moment.

So had her friends. Mary Beth Thome thought about the life Sarah never got to live. “She loved art. She loved to dance,” Mary Beth said.

“What would she have become in those years that were taken from her? I think she would have been a beautiful person. ”

Two weeks later, on May 25th, 2023, the court reconvened for sentencing. Because Nicholas had been acquitted of premeditated murder, he no longer faced a mandatory life sentence.

But the jury’s finding of sexual motivation gave the judge the power to go above the standard sentencing range, and the prosecutors intended to ask her to use it. The defense asked for the minimum the law allowed: twenty years. David Montes argued that Nicholas’s earlier crimes had been the impulsive acts of a young man, that his offending had stopped as he matured, and that he had committed no crimes in the decades since. He told the court that Nicholas had nightmares about his past.

He described twenty years as a severe sentence, especially since it would almost certainly represent the rest of Nicholas’s life. He also acknowledged that the details of Sarah’s case were beyond words. Mary Barbosa asked for an exceptional sentence. She called Nicholas a prolific sex offender, a man who had killed Sarah while he was on parole for attempted rape.

She said the sentence was not about vengeance. It was about the severity of the crime, the women he had attacked before, and the years he had remained free on a parole that should have been revoked. In her sentencing memo, she noted that although no one will ever know exactly how the encounter with Sarah began, Nicholas had a long pattern of approaching women with knives and forcing them to walk to secluded places. Then the people who had lost the most stood up to speak.

Laura Yarborough described her daughter. Sarah was smart, creative, and generous. She planted flowers. She helped her brothers with their homework.

She loved ballet and museums. She planned to go to college out of state. “She was our only daughter,” Laura said, “and the delight of my life. She made those of us around her better.

”

Then she described what came after. “When we lost her,” she said, “our family was irrevocably changed. We’ve never been the same. Our lives went from full color to fuzzy gray.

”

Sarah never got to go to college. She never got to marry or to have children. Laura said she tried not to say the killer’s name. She did not want to give him any space in her thoughts.

She told the court she believed he was incapable of remorse or empathy and that he should never be paroled. Her goal, she said, was to make sure that no other woman would ever be harmed by him. Bobby Joe Yarborough, the wife of Sarah’s brother, Micah, spoke for him. She told the court about his struggles, his mental illness, and his nightmares about the man who killed his sister.

“My husband,” she said, “still grieves the loving tenderness of his older sister. ”

Michelle Maddox, Sarah’s best friend, spoke about the years Nicholas had been free and how every new development in the case had forced her to relive the loss. “I had to grieve,” she said, “and regrieve my best friend’s murder. ”

Mary Beth Thome said that the murderer had met the hand of justice and that the resolution had come from years of difficult, dedicated work.

Michael Hatch, retired now, told the court about the candle he lights for Sarah every December 14th. He apologized to Laura Yarborough that it had taken so long, and he asked the judge to impose the full sentence. And then Anne Crony spoke. She had agreed to be publicly named.

She told the court about the knife at her throat, about the march toward the river, and about diving into the water and swimming for her life. She said she had found peace and had moved on with her life until she learned what the man who attacked her had gone on to do. The strongest feeling she had now, she said, was anger. “The system failed me,” she said.

“It failed Sarah and countless others. ”

Patrick Nicholas did not speak. He showed no visible reaction. Judge Josephine Wiggs addressed the defense’s claim about his youth.

The court had to consider his youth, she said, because young people are different. But she rejected the idea that youth explained what he had done. His conduct, she said, reflected not an undeveloped mind, but a calculated, predatory, depraved one. She said it was so cruel that a girl known for her kindness and her concern for others had become the victim of such a crime.

She called the attack an outrageous sexual assault upon a child, culminating in her murder, and said it justified an exceptional sentence. She praised the detectives who had worked the case for three decades. And she spoke about what Sarah’s case should mean. “There will be accountability,” Judge Wiggs said, “no matter how many years it takes.

And today is that day. ”

She sentenced Patrick Nicholas to 548 months in prison: forty-five years and eight months, the full term the prosecutors had asked for. She also ordered him to pay restitution to Sarah’s family. Nicholas was fifty-nine years old.

If he served the full sentence, he would not be released until he was about 105. With the limited time off he could earn for good behavior, prosecutors expected him to serve nearly all of it. In practical terms, it was a life sentence. His lawyer filed a notice of appeal the same day.

The case of Sarah Yarborough leaves lessons that reach far beyond Federal Way. The first lesson is about the gap in the database. Patrick Nicholas had five known prior sexual offenses before he was identified. He had been to prison.

He was on parole the morning Sarah died. And yet his DNA was never collected. So for twenty-eight years, the national database could not find him. The search that finally named him did not go through his criminal record at all.

It went through the family trees of strangers. A criminal justice system that had him in its hands more than once never took the one sample that could have named him the first time his profile was searched. The second lesson is about sentences that are not served. A judge gave Nicholas the maximum sentence for what he did to Anne Crony.

He served about a third of it. Anne believed for decades that the man who attacked her was locked away. If he had been, he could not have been in that parking lot in December 1991. Early release is meant to reward rehabilitation.

In this case, it returned a dangerous man to the community while he was still dangerous. The third lesson is about witnesses. Two boys on their way to go skateboarding, and a jogger who thought he was seeing a couple, gave investigators a description that held up for thirty-one years. When Parabon built a face from the killer’s DNA in 2018, it looked like the sketch from 1991.

The witnesses saw the right man. They just could not tell anyone his name. The fourth lesson is about persistence. Susan Peters, Jim Doyon, Michael Hatch, Jim Allen, Kathleen Decker.

Detective after detective picked up the file and refused to close it. Jim Allen kept working the case after he retired. Michael Hatch lit a candle every year. Colleen Fitzpatrick was first brought in during 2011, and when her first attempt did not solve it, she was brought back in 2018.

Cases like this one are solved by people who will not let them go. And the last lesson is about a community’s memory. The students who were at Federal Way High School in 1991 never forgot Sarah. They walked each other to their cars.

They kept her seat. They built her a bench that says Carpe Diem. Twenty-eight years later, they came back to that bench with flowers. A murder can take a life in an hour.

The memory of that life can last much longer than the man who took it. Sarah Louise Yarborough was sixteen years old. She was a junior at Federal Way High School who earned top grades, danced ballet, and had just joined the drill team. She was the girl who always made it to class at the last second, and whose teacher never once marked her late.

She was the friend who was always there when you were down. She was the only daughter of Tom and Laura Yarborough, the sister of Micah and Andrew. She traveled to New Zealand to dance. She loved books and art and museums.

She was going to go to college far from home and see the world. On the one morning she was early, she was alone in a parking lot with a man who had already hurt other women and who had been allowed to walk free. She fought him. She left his DNA under her fingernails.

And twenty-eight years later, that fight helped bring him to justice.