On the morning of December 14, 1991, sixteen-year-old Sarah Yarbrough rushed out of her house in Federal Way, Washington. She was still wearing hot rollers in her hair, and she had on her drill team uniform. She believed she was late for a Saturday morning competition and did not want to let her team down. She grabbed her father’s car keys and drove to Federal Way High School.
She pulled into the parking lot just after eight in the morning. The school grounds were quiet. No one was there. She was not late.
She was a full hour early. She got out of the car and waited. There was no reason to think anything was wrong. The rest of the team would arrive eventually.
Someone else was already close by, watching. Later that morning, two boys, aged twelve and thirteen, were cutting across the campus on their way to go skating. They took a shortcut they knew well. As they crossed the grounds, they saw a man emerge suddenly from behind a hill at the edge of campus and walk away quickly.
Something about the way he moved made them decide not to follow him. Instead, they went into the bushes. There they found Sarah Yarbrough, barely clothed, motionless, in a heavily wooded area about three hundred feet from her car. She was still wearing her drill team uniform.
Her tights had been pulled from her body and used to strangle her. Another witness, a runner who had passed through the area earlier, told investigators he had seen a girl lying still on the ground with a man kneeling over her. He thought they were a couple kissing. He kept running.
He did not stop. He did not call anyone. He continued his Saturday as if nothing had happened. The medical examiner later confirmed the cause of death: a combination of ligature strangulation and manual strangulation.
Sarah had also been beaten. There was no evidence of intercourse, but investigators recovered a full male DNA profile from semen found on her clothing. The man who did this was Patrick Leon Nicholas. He had been convicted of attempted rape eight years earlier.
Under his sentence, he should have remained in prison until 1993. He was released early and was on parole when he killed Sarah Yarbrough. In 1983, in Benton County, Washington, Nicholas had approached a young woman named Anne Crony near her car. He pushed his hand through her open driver’s side window and held a knife to her throat.
He ordered her to undress and forced her to walk toward a river. She jumped into the river and swam. She later said she swam with more strength than she had ever used in her life. She survived.
Nicholas was convicted of first-degree attempted rape and sentenced to prison. But he was released early. He was on parole when he killed Sarah. More than forty years later, Anne Crony stood in a King County courtroom and said: “The system failed me.
The system failed Sarah. ”
After Sarah’s murder, Nicholas continued his pattern of sexual assaults. In 1993, two years after her death, he was arrested for harassing a child. His pattern was consistent across multiple attacks: finding a woman alone near her car, approaching with a knife, forcing her to walk to an isolated area.
He had been doing this for years before Sarah was killed. The system knew. And the system let him out. Investigators discovered that around the time of Sarah’s murder, Nicholas regularly rode a bus line that passed directly by Federal Way High School.
He had no connection to the school. He was not a student. But he rode that route. He watched the campus.
He learned it. On the morning of December 14, 1991, he was there when a sixteen-year-old girl arrived an hour before everyone else. For thirty-one years, the King County Sheriff’s Office detectives assigned to Sarah’s case refused to let it go. More than four thousand leads were investigated over the decades.
Suspects were interviewed and cleared. Evidence was re-examined as technology improved. In 2011, forensic scientists were able to determine physical traits and ancestral origins from the DNA profile, creating a picture of the suspect from his genetic material alone. But no name could be attached to it.
The man they were searching for had never been convicted of a crime that required his DNA to be entered into any searchable database. Every advance in forensic technology brought them closer to a face, but not to a name. Sarah’s mother, Laura Yarbrough, later described what those three decades felt like. She said: “We lived the last 30 years wondering when and if someone would be arrested, and we knew it was like a sword of Damocles hanging over our heads, you never know when it’s going to fall.
” She said that even when she lost hope at times, the detectives never did. That difference meant everything to her. She held on to that. In 2019, twenty-eight years after the murder, King County investigators arranged for forensic genetic genealogy analysis of the preserved DNA.
Genealogists built family trees from partial matches in public genealogy databases, narrowing the pool of possible suspects branch by branch. The analysis identified two brothers. The older brother’s DNA was already in CODIS from an unrelated case. He was eliminated immediately.
The younger brother was Patrick Leon Nicholas, then fifty-five years old, living in Covington, Washington, just six miles from Federal Way High School. Detectives placed him under surveillance. Over several days, they collected items he discarded: cigarettes, a tissue. The DNA from those discarded items was sent to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab.
On October 2, 2019, the lab confirmed that the DNA from the cigarettes matched the DNA found on Sarah Yarbrough’s clothing in 1991. It was an exact match. That same day, investigators found Nicholas at a business in Kent, Washington, and arrested him. His bail was set at five million dollars.
Patrick Leon Nicholas’s trial began in the spring of 2023 in King County. For more than two and a half weeks, the jury heard evidence gathered over thirty-one years of investigation. They heard what was found at the crime scene. They heard the DNA evidence.
They heard about his prior convictions and the pattern of predatory behavior that prosecutors argued had defined his adult life. Senior Deputy Prosecutor Mary Barbosa told the jury: “Mr. Nicholas is a serial sex offender. He killed Sarah Yarbrough while on parole from attempting to rape another woman.
”
No one will ever know exactly how Nicholas forced Sarah away from her car and into the trees. But Barbosa presented his method from four previous attacks: a knife at the throat, a woman alone near her car, forcing the victim to walk to an isolated area. She argued this was exactly what had happened to Sarah. On May 10, 2023, the jury convicted Patrick Leon Nicholas of first-degree murder and second-degree murder, both with sexual motivation.
He sat at the defense table and showed no reaction. Sentencing was held on May 25, 2023. Before the judge issued the sentence, those who had lived with the details of this case for thirty-one years stood and spoke. Andrew Yarbrough, Sarah’s younger brother, had been eleven years old when his sister was killed.
He stood in the courtroom and said: “I still remember the pain of my dad’s voice over the phone telling me Sarah died. I remember the sounds of my parents crying behind walls at night while I was lying in my bed. ” At eleven years old, he lay in the dark listening to his parents fall apart, with no words for what was happening and no place to put the grief. That moment did not end when morning came.
It followed him for thirty-one years. Laura Yarbrough stood before the court and spoke of what had been taken from her. She said: “I never got the chance to take Sarah to buy a prom dress or a wedding dress, to see her fall in love, to become a mother, or to enjoy any grandkids she might have given us. When we lost her, our family changed forever and irreversibly.
” Then she said something about Nicholas that carried more weight than any court sentence. She said he was incapable of remorse or empathy and should spend the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole. And then she said this: “After the sentencing, as I stand outside the courtroom surrounded by news cameras, I try to leave him as little space in my thoughts as possible. I don’t think he deserves my time or attention.
”
After thirty-one years of waiting, when the answer finally came, she chose to give him nothing. Not her grief. Not her anger. Not a corner of her mind that he had already stolen too much from.
Then a detective named Hutch stood up. He had worked on the case. He was close to seventy years old. He looked at Laura Yarbrough and said: “Laura Yarbrough, I am sorry this took so long.
” He spoke about a colleague, Detective Jim Doyan, who had also worked the case and had since died. Hutch said that when his time came and he met Detective Doyan at the gate, Doyan would ask him: “Was the case solved? ” And he would tell him: “Yes, Jim. ”
A single shout came from somewhere in the courtroom when the sentence was read.
Judge Wicks sentenced Patrick Leon Nicholas to 548 months, roughly forty-six years in prison. Nicholas showed no reaction and did not address the court. He plans to appeal. He was fifty-nine years old.
It is almost certain he will die in prison. Anne Crony was right. The system failed Sarah. It failed before December 14, 1991.
The failure happened years earlier in a judicial decision that was not reviewed carefully enough, granting a convicted rapist freedom before his time and returning him to the world where Sarah Yarbrough was waiting, unknowing. After the sentencing, Laura Yarbrough told reporters that her goal throughout the trial had been to ensure no other woman was hurt or killed by Nicholas. It was not a request for revenge or closure. It was a practical, forward-looking goal: preventing what had happened to her daughter from happening to anyone else’s.
She said: “We will always miss Sarah. We still miss her. ” She kept saying that for thirty-one years. The longing does not lessen with time.
The emptiness does not become easier to manage. You simply learn to live with it. You learn which chairs to avoid, which questions to deflect, which dates on the calendar to prepare for. You do not stop missing them.
You just become more able to carry it. Sarah Yarbrough was sixteen years old. She was a straight-A student and a member of the drill team. She rushed out of her house one Saturday morning with hot rollers in her hair because she loved what she was part of and did not want to let anyone down.
She drove her father’s car to school. She arrived early, walked into a quiet parking lot, and stood there waiting. She was three hundred feet from safety, and she never made it.