On a rainy Saturday morning in December 1991, 16-year-old Sarah Yarborough drove to Federal Way High School in Washington for a drill team competition. She arrived early, parked her father’s car near the tennis courts, and was never seen alive again.
The case had everything investigators usually need. An eyewitness saw a man leaving the scene. A complete DNA profile was recovered from the crime scene. More than 4,000 tips poured in from the community. Yet the investigation stalled for nearly three decades.
Sarah was an 11th-grade honor student, a drill team member, and someone her teachers remembered for her character. On the morning of December 14th, she left home in such a hurry that hot rollers were still in her hair. She thought she was running late, but she arrived more than an hour before the team was scheduled to gather.
The parking lot was empty. No staff, no teammates, no witnesses. The entire crime occurred in a 70-minute window between 8:10 and 9:20 a.m.
When drill team members arrived around 9:00, they found Sarah’s car but not Sarah. Around 9:20, two boys taking a shortcut across campus saw a man step out of the bushes near the tennis courts. Minutes later, they found Sarah’s body.
She had been strangled by ligature and by hand. Her stockings were wrapped around her neck. Forensic investigators found semen on multiple items of her clothing, enough to build a complete male DNA profile. Skin under her fingernails showed she had fought back.
The witness descriptions converged on a white male, about 6 feet tall, with long blonde hair and acne or acne scars. A composite sketch was released. The tip line was flooded with more than 4,000 leads.
Detective Jim Doyon, a veteran of the Green River Killer Task Force, took over the case. Every suspect was interviewed. DNA was collected and compared. Every time, no match.
When the FBI’s CODIS national DNA database became operational in 1998, King County uploaded the killer’s profile. It was run repeatedly as the database grew. There were never any hits.
The problem was not the quality of the DNA. It was that the killer had no profile in the system. Despite a prior sex crime conviction in 1983, his DNA had never been entered into CODIS.
By the early 2000s, investigators had reviewed more than 3,000 leads. Doyon continued working the case even after retirement. DNA scientist Jody Sass re-ran results every time a new suspect sample came in. All negative.
In 2004, an updated composite sketch was released. In 2018, DNA phenotyping was used to create new facial images from the suspect’s genetic material. The images were widely shared. No one called with the name Patrick Nicholas.
In 2011, King County investigators tried something no one had ever attempted in a criminal case. They contacted Colleen Fitzpatrick, a pioneer in forensic genetic genealogy, and asked if DNA from the crime scene could be used to trace the suspect through his family tree.
Fitzpatrick used autosomal SNP testing, which can detect distant genetic relationships down to third, fourth, and fifth cousins. She uploaded the crime scene DNA to public genealogy databases and began building a family tree backward from the unidentified killer.
After months of work, she traced the killer’s ancestry back to Robert Fuller, a man whose family came to America on the Mayflower in 1620. But from Fuller to a specific person in 1991, there were hundreds of descendants and thousands of possible suspects.
The databases at the time were too small to narrow it down. Fitzpatrick kept building the family tree for eight years, combining genetic data with census records and public genealogy documents. As commercial DNA databases grew to millions of profiles, the map became clearer.
In September 2019, the list was narrowed to two brothers: Edward Nicholas and Patrick Nicholas. Edward was ruled out by a direct DNA comparison. That left Patrick.
Patrick Leon Nicholas was born in 1964, making him 27 in December 1991. He lived in Des Moines, Washington, just a few miles from Federal Way High School. He had a prior sex crime record. Investigators confirmed he frequently rode a bus line that passed through the school area.
But genetic genealogy alone was not enough for court. They needed direct DNA from Nicholas. Detectives began following him, mapping his routines, waiting for the right moment.
At a shopping center in Kent, they watched Nicholas smoke a cigarette outside. When he tossed the cigarette butt and a napkin on the ground and walked inside, detectives collected them.
The DNA from the discarded items matched the DNA from Sarah Yarborough’s clothing in 1991. Not close. Not partial. The same person.
Patrick Nicholas was arrested at a bar in Kent in October 2019, 28 years after the murder. He was 55 years old and charged with first-degree murder and rape.
During a search of his home, detectives found a 1994 newspaper with a front-page article about the Sarah Yarborough case. He had kept it. He had followed the case for years.
The trial began in April 2023. Prosecutors presented the DNA match, the skin under Sarah’s fingernails, and the genetic genealogy journey from the Mayflower to the Nicholas brothers. The defense argued that Nicholas did not match witness descriptions and that the genealogy process was flawed.
On May 10, 2023, the jury found Nicholas guilty of first-degree felony murder and second-degree murder. They also found the murder was sexually motivated, allowing for an exceptional sentence.
On May 25, 2023, Judge Josephine Wiggs sentenced Patrick Nicholas to 548 months, or 45 years and 8 months, in prison. The sentence ensured he would die in prison.
Sarah’s brother Andrew, who was 11 when she was killed, spoke in court about the sound of his parents crying and how the family was irrevocably changed. Nicholas sat silently, showing no emotion and offering no apology.
The Sarah Yarborough case was the first in the world to use genetic genealogy to generate an investigative lead in a criminal case. The technique Fitzpatrick developed in 2011 became the foundation for a new forensic science. In 2018, the Golden State Killer case brought the method to global attention.
The case also raised a question that was never answered. Nicholas was sentenced to 10 years in 1983 for a sex crime, released after just over three years for good behavior and participation in a treatment program. Eight years later, he killed Sarah. No official ever explained why he was released early.
The case left practical lessons. Biological evidence from old cases may still be preserved, and genetic genealogy is now widely used. Victims’ families can ask investigators whether it has been considered.
It also raised questions about parole policies for violent sex offenders and about the role of commercial DNA databases in law enforcement. Each person must decide for themselves whether to upload their DNA, but the choice should be informed.
Sarah Yarborough’s family waited 31 years for the word guilty. When it came, it closed the case of Patrick Nicholas. But the darkness of that December morning, and the questions about the system that let him walk free, never fully lifted.