On the morning of Saturday, December 14th, 1991, a sixteen-year-old girl named Sarah Yarborough pulled her father’s car into the nearly empty north parking lot of Federal Way High School, about twenty miles south of Seattle. She was a junior, an honor student, a dancer, and a member of the school’s drill team. That morning she was running early for a competition, still in her uniform, her hair in a ponytail with hot rollers in it. The lot was empty.

The drill team was not due to meet for another hour. Somewhere nearby, a man had already arrived. By mid-morning, two boys cutting through the school grounds on their way to go skateboarding found Sarah lying in the bushes near the tennis courts, partially dressed, strangled with her own nylons. She had also been sexually assaulted.

Her body was discovered approximately three hundred feet from her father’s car. The man who killed her was Patrick Nicholas. In June 1983, he had been convicted of first-degree attempted rape in Benton County, Washington, after attacking a young woman named Ann Ruley at knifepoint near her car in a park along the Columbia River. He had forced her toward the river before she broke free, dove into the water, and swam to safety.

Nicholas received a ten-year sentence. He served three and a half years. By December 1991, he was a free man, twenty-seven years old, living about eight miles from Federal Way High School and regularly taking a bus route that passed the campus. If he had served his full sentence, he would still have been behind bars that morning.

He was not. From the first hours of the investigation, King County detectives had more physical evidence than they knew what to do with. Forensic scientists collected DNA from semen stains on Sarah’s clothing and from material recovered under her fingernails because she had fought back. It was a clean, complete profile from a single male contributor.

In 1991, at the very dawn of forensic DNA technology, that was considered an extraordinary asset. They also had witnesses. The two boys who found Sarah, thirteen-year-old Drew Miller and his twelve-year-old friend, sat with a sketch artist and produced a composite of a man they had seen emerging from the bushes, a man with a reddened, pockmarked face. A jogger who had passed through the campus that morning also came forward after learning what had happened.

He had seen a man kneeling over a young woman near the bushes and assumed they were a couple. He had kept running. His description, combined with the boys’, formed the basis of the sketch that detectives would carry with them for twenty-eight years. What the investigators did not have was a name.

Patrick Nicholas was never on their radar. Not once, not in the first weeks, not in the first years. His name appeared in none of the nearly four thousand tips investigators eventually received. There was no connection between him and Sarah Yarborough.

He was invisible to the investigation, and he would remain invisible for almost three decades. The DNA profile was run through the state database, then the national CODIS system once it was established in the early 1990s, then Interpol. Every time, no match. Between two and three hundred individuals were swabbed over the years.

Detectives chased down leads, cross-referenced tips, and submitted samples from men who matched the sketch or whose names kept surfacing in the community. Every sample came back negative. Every lead went cold. There were two reasons Nicholas’s DNA was never in the system, and both were system failures.

His 1983 rape conviction predated CODIS, so his profile was never entered. And in 1993, two years after Sarah’s murder, when Nicholas was arrested for first-degree child molestation, a charge that carried a DNA collection requirement, he was allowed to plead down to a gross misdemeanor assault, a charge that did not require DNA submission. He had five known sexual offenses on his record, and not one of them had left a trace in the one database that could have identified him. In 2011, twenty years after the murder, a forensic genealogist named Colleen Fitzpatrick agreed to look at the crime scene DNA from a completely different angle.

Fitzpatrick held a PhD in nuclear physics and had spent twenty-five years working on laser measurement systems for NASA and the Department of Defense. She was not a detective. She was a scientist. And she asked a different question: not whose DNA is this, but whose family does this DNA come from?

She took the Y chromosome profile from the crime scene and compared it against public genealogy databases, databases families used to trace their ancestry, databases that had nothing to do with law enforcement. It was the first time anyone had ever used consumer DNA genealogy data to generate investigative leads in a criminal cold case. Within weeks, Fitzpatrick found a match. The killer’s Y chromosome profile matched members of a genealogy project tracing descendants of Robert Fuller, a settler who had arrived in Salem, Massachusetts in the 1630s, related to passengers who came to America on the Mayflower.

The DNA from a crime scene in suburban Seattle had been traced back nearly four hundred years to a family that arrived on the continent before the nation existed. But a family tree spanning four centuries and likely thousands of living descendants is not a name. When King County detectives heard the name Fuller, they thought of one person: Bill Fuller, a longtime family friend of the Yarboroughs, a man who had helped build the memorial bench for Sarah at the high school, a man whose daughter had been her classmate. Bill Fuller voluntarily gave a DNA sample.

He was not the killer. He was a paternal cousin of the killer, somewhere in the same family line, but not the man himself. The investigation had a family tree. It had a confirmed cousin.

It still had no name. In 2018, something changed in the wider world of forensic science. In California, investigators used genetic genealogy to identify the Golden State Killer, a man who had evaded capture for forty years. The technique worked spectacularly, and it opened the door to a new generation of tools and databases.

Detective Kathleen Decker, who had inherited the case after Detective Jim Allen retired, went back to Fitzpatrick. This time they used autosomal SNP testing, a more comprehensive analysis that looks across the entire genome, and uploaded the profile to GEDmatch, one of the few genealogy databases that explicitly allowed law enforcement searches. In September 2019, Fitzpatrick’s team made a breakthrough. Two brothers, both living in King County, both distant cousins of Bill Fuller, and therefore descendants of Robert Fuller’s line.

Their names were Edward Nicholas and Patrick Nicholas. Edward’s DNA was already in CODIS. It was not a match. That left his brother.

Patrick Leon Nicholas, fifty-five years old, living in Covington, Washington. As investigators pulled his record, something extraordinary emerged. He had five known sexual offenses. He had been convicted of rape as a juvenile.

He had attacked Ann Ruley in 1983. He had been arrested for child molestation in 1993. Not one of these offenses had resulted in his DNA being entered into any law enforcement database. He had existed for thirty years completely outside the system’s ability to see him.

Detectives put Nicholas under surveillance. For two days they watched him. At one point an investigator approached him and asked for directions, a pretext, nothing more, a way to confirm they had the right man. Then they waited.

Outside a laundromat in Kent, they watched Nicholas smoke a cigarette, then a second cigarette. He dropped the butts on the ground. A napkin fell from his pocket. When he was gone, investigators collected all three items.

They were rushed to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab. Five days later, on October 2nd, 2019, the call came back. The DNA from the cigarette butts matched the DNA recovered from Sarah Yarborough’s clothing twenty-eight years earlier. The same man, the same profile.

Prosecutors would later tell a jury it was 590 billion times more likely to be Patrick Nicholas than any random unrelated person on Earth. Nicholas was arrested that same evening, taken into custody without incident. When detectives told him they were investigating the murder of a young girl named Sarah Yarborough, he asked what year this was. After an hour and a half, he asked for a lawyer and said nothing more.

When investigators searched his home, they found a newspaper from 1994, folded and kept, its front page carrying an article about the unsolved murder of Sarah Yarborough. He had kept it for twenty-five years. In a kitchen drawer, they also found a photograph torn from a magazine of a woman in a cheerleading outfit. Before the trial, detectives reached out to a woman living in Oregon, Ann Ruley, now in her fifties.

She had thought for thirty years that the man who attacked her was behind her. She was wrong. She had fought for the maximum sentence in 1983 and believed he had served all ten years. He had served three and a half.

His parole file noted no major infractions and no substance abuse issues. One evaluation concluded he would be, in the actual words of the report, “safe to be at large given an ongoing therapeutic relationship and parole supervision. ” In 1987, he walked out of prison. Four years later, he boarded a bus past Federal Way High School.

When detectives told Ruley in 2019 that Nicholas had been arrested for murdering Sarah Yarborough, she said she was crushed. “It had never occurred to me,” she said, “that what I escaped from was a murderer. ”

At Nicholas’s sentencing hearing in May 2023, Ruley stood in the same courtroom as the man who had held a knife to her throat forty years earlier. She looked at him directly and said, “The system failed me.

It failed Sarah and countless others. ” If Nicholas had served his full ten-year sentence, he would have remained in prison until 1993, two years after Sarah Yarborough was murdered. He would not have been on that bus. He would not have been in that parking lot.

On May 10th, 2023, thirty-one years, four months, and twenty-six days after Sarah Yarborough arrived early to a school parking lot on a December morning, a King County jury found Patrick Leon Nicholas guilty of first-degree murder with sexual motivation. The jury deliberated for a day and a half. Two weeks later, Judge Josephine Wiggs sentenced him to 548 months in prison, nearly forty-six years, a sentence that, given his age, means he will almost certainly die behind bars. Before handing down the sentence, she said, “It’s so cruel that someone who was so young, so generous with her spirit, and so concerned with the safety of others, would be the victim of such predatory, depraved conduct.

”

Laura Yarborough was the first to speak at the sentencing hearing. She called her daughter the delight of her life. She spoke about the thirty years, the Decembers that came every year without an answer. “Even when I had given up,” she said of the detectives, “they never did.

” Drew Miller, now grown, also spoke. He said that coming face to face with what he saw that morning had deeply impacted his entire life. It had impacted all of them. The teacher who rearranged the desks on a Monday morning because he could not bear the visible gap where Sarah used to sit.

The friend who said she did not think Sarah had ever done a mean thing to anybody in the entire world. An entire community had been shaped by a single morning they could not un-know.