On the morning of December 14th, 1991, a man jogging past Federal Way High School outside Seattle saw a man kneeling over a girl on the ground near some bushes. He assumed they were a couple, so he kept running. The girl was 16 years old. She was alone on campus an hour early for a drill team competition that hadn’t started yet.

 By the time anyone found her, she’d been beaten and strangled. Investigators recovered a full DNA profile of the killer  that same day. They tested nearly a hundred men over the next 28 years. None of them matched. The man who did it was living 20 minutes away the  entire time. Her name was Sarah Yarborough.

 She was a junior at Federal Way High School, about 20 miles south of Seattle, on the honor roll and the school’s  drill team. Her mother, Laura, described her as artistic and philosophical, the kind of person who put people at ease and built bridges in her own quiet way. Sarah told her mother once that she felt alive when she danced.

 She was thinking about college, wanted to go out of state and spread her wings. She planted flowers  every spring, helped her younger brothers with their homework. She was 16. Saturday, December 14th, 1991. There was a drill team competition that morning at another school,  and Sarah thought she was running late.

 She left the house in a rush, already in her drill team uniform with hot rollers in her ponytail, and drove her father’s car  to the school. Oh, she got there a little after 8:00 a.m. The team wasn’t scheduled to meet for another hour. She was early, not late, >>  >> and the only person on campus. When her teammates arrived later, Sarah’s car was in the parking lot, but she wasn’t there.

 They boarded the bus without her. Her body was found on a hillside near the tennis courts  in an overgrown area well away from the lot, partially hidden in the brush. Nobody saw what happened between her car and that hillside. It wasn’t her teammates who found her. Two 12-year-old boys were cutting through the campus that morning to go skateboarding.

Drew Miller lived down the street from the school. He and his friend saw a man  walk out of the bushes on the embankment and quickly head the other way. The man kept glancing back at them as he left. The boys didn’t think much of it at first. Then they went up the embankment and  found Sarah’s body.

 She was partially undressed. They ran to one of their homes and told the boys’ parents who called 911. Sarah had been beaten. She had injuries to her face and her legs were scratched and dirty. She’d been strangled with her own nylons, which were wrapped around her neck. Male DNA was found under her fingernails. She had fought back.

Investigators also recovered a male DNA profile from semen found on her clothing. Oh, between the fingernails and the clothing, the killer had left more than enough to identify  him. They just needed a name. The jogger who’d passed the campus earlier came forward after seeing the news. He gave police a description of the man he’d seen.

 Between him, Miller, and Miller’s friend, police had enough detail for a sketch artist  to produce a composite of the suspect. Late teens or early 20s, shaggy, dirty blonde hair, blue eyes. The sketch was released to the public  and posted all around the Federal Way area. A second, more detailed  sketch was released later based on additional witness interviews.

Police had a DNA profile, eyewitnesses, and a composite with specific features. Nobody matched. The sketch  generated leads. The DNA profile was run through CODIS, the FBI’s national database of DNA profiles from convicted felons. No match. Detectives began collecting DNA samples from men who came up as possible suspects and sending them to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab for comparison against the crime scene profile.

Over the years, nearly a hundred men were tested. >>  >> Every single one was eliminated. People the sketch reminded someone of, men with records who lived in the area, anyone who fit the description. The killer wasn’t among them. Tips kept coming, over 3,000 of them, eventually climbing past 4,000 by the time of the arrest.

Local media covered every development. >>  >> Every few years a new lead would surface and the community would hold its breath. Then nothing. The DNA profile was sitting right there. A complete genetic identity of the man who killed Sarah Yarborough, and it couldn’t be matched to anyone. CODIS only contained profiles from people who’d been required to give a DNA  sample as part of a conviction, and those requirements had been added to the law gradually  over the years.

If the killer had been convicted of before DNA collection was mandatory, he wouldn’t be in the database. He could have a criminal record and still be invisible. Detective Jim Doyon worked Sarah’s murder for years. He was a well-respected homicide investigator, part of the Green River Killer Task Force,  and one of the most experienced detectives in the department.

 He retired without solving the case. Detective Michael Hatch took it on next. Hatch had been one of the first to respond to the scene in 1991, and Sarah’s case stayed with him for the rest of his career. DNA analyst Jody Sass at the State  Patrol Crime Lab ran every new suspect sample as fast as she could get them.

 She’d been working it since she was a new analyst in ’91. Year after year, the same result. In 1993, students gathered in the courtyard of Federal Way High School and unveiled a memorial bench in Sarah’s honor. A family friend named Bill Fuller had helped spearhead it. Fuller said there were tears as people looked  at the bench, that you could see Sarah in it.

 Classmates of Sarah’s graduated, went to college, started careers and families. The memorial bench stayed on campus  and the case stayed open, but Sarah was still 16. In 2011, 20 years after the murder, King County detectives  tried something that had never been done before on any criminal case in the world. They brought in a genetic  genealogist named Colleen Fitzpatrick and asked her to trace the killer’s family tree using consumer DNA databases,  the kind where people upload their ancestry test results.

Even if the killer himself hadn’t taken a test, a distant relative might have. From there, Fitzpatrick could  work backward through the family tree and narrow down who he was. Fitzpatrick found  a connection. The DNA linked the suspect’s lineage back to a man named Robert Fuller, who had arrived in America on the Mayflower and  first settled in Salem, Massachusetts in the 1630s.

That meant the killer was a descendant of one of the earliest European families in American history. Sh- It was the first break  in 20 years and the first time this technique had been used in a criminal investigation anywhere. But the family tree branching out from a man who died four centuries ago was enormous, thousands of descendants  scattered across the country.

Fitzpatrick couldn’t narrow it to a single living suspect. The lead sat there, promising but unworkable,  for eight more years. In September 2019, Fitzpatrick’s team made the final connection. The databases had improved since 2011 and the matching tools were better. They worked forward through the Fuller family tree, cross-referencing consumer DNA matches with public records, and narrowed the DNA to two brothers living in King County, Washington.

 The same county where Sarah had been killed. Both were sex offenders and both were descendants of the Mayflower passenger Robert Fuller. One brother’s DNA was already in CODIS from a prior rape conviction. Detectives checked it against the crime scene profile and ruled him out. That left the other brother. He had five sexual assaults  that police knew of. His method was consistent.

 He would find women who were alone near their cars, pull a knife, and force them to  walk somewhere secluded. Oh, Sarah’s body had been found 300 feet from  her parked car on a hillside she had no reason to walk to on her own. Prosecutors would later conclude he had forced her there at knife point. In June 1983, eight years before Sarah’s murder, a 21-year-old woman named Ann Crony had gone to a park by the Columbia River in Richland, Washington.

 She wanted to sit by the water and think. She was in her car when this man, 19 at the time, approached, put a knife to her throat, and forced her to undress. He marched her out of the car and down an embankment toward the river. Crony jumped in and swam to the other side. He was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in  prison.

He served three and a half. His file noted no major infractions and no drug or alcohol problem. Yet one evaluation said he would be safe to be at large given ongoing therapeutic relationship and parole supervision. He was released in 1987 with a condition that he attend outpatient  sex offender treatment.

 Crony was never notified. She’d believed for years that the man who held a knife to her throat had served the full 10.  If he had served his full 10-year sentence, he would have been in prison until 1993. Sarah Yarborough was murdered in December 1991. Three years after killing her  in 1994, he sexually assaulted a minor.

None of his convictions required  a DNA sample, so he never entered CODIS. For decades, he lived in the same area as the crime scene,  completely invisible to the detectives who’d been trying to match that DNA since 1991. His brother’s  profile had been sitting in CODIS for years, but Washington state didn’t allow familial DNA searching.

His name was Patrick Nicholas. Detectives began following him. They set up surveillance over a weekend,  watching his routine, learning where he went and when, looking for a chance to  collect something with his DNA on it without him knowing. They followed him to a laundromat in Kent and watched him  step outside to smoke two cigarettes.

When he dropped the butts in a napkin on the  ground, the detectives waited for him to go back inside, then moved in and collected them. The samples were rushed  to the state patrol crime lab, the same lab where Jody Sass had been testing suspects in this case for 28 years. Within days, the call came back.

 The DNA on the cigarette matched the DNA found on  Sarah’s clothing in 1991. Patrick Nicholas was arrested on the evening  of October 2nd, 2019 at a business in Kent. He was 55 years old, while living in a dilapidated building on a large property in Covington with few ties to anyone around him. Bail was set at $5 million.

During interrogation, detectives told him they were investigating the murder of Sarah Yarborough. Nicholas asked what year this was. Detectives noted that question. An innocent person doesn’t ask what year. Someone who’s only done this once already knows which case the police  mean. Nicholas maintained his innocence after that and said nothing else of substance.

When detectives searched his home,  they found a torn magazine photograph of a woman in a cheerleading outfit in a kitchen drawer. They also found a newspaper from 1994 with a front page article about the Sarah Yarborough case. He’d kept it for 25 years. Almost 4,000 tips had come in over 28 years.

  Not a single one had ever identified Patrick Nicholas. He’d never been a suspect  or even questioned until Fitzpatrick’s genealogy work pointed to his family. In the spring of 2023, more than 31 years after Sarah’s murder, Patrick Nicholas went on trial at the Maleng Regional Justice Center  in Kent.

 He was 59 years old. He’d pleaded not guilty throughout. The judge ruled that Nicholas’s criminal history could not be entered as evidence, finding it would be unfairly prejudicial. The jury would never hear about Crony or the 1983 attack or the early release or the pattern of approaching women at their cars with a knife.

 They would decide the case on the DNA and whatever else the prosecution could present  from the crime scene. Sarah’s childhood friends came to the trial. They’d known her since they were kids  and they sat through three weeks of testimony about how she died. One of them said she remembered the morning before the trial started, “Me sitting there thinking she didn’t know if she could do this.

” The prosecution built their case on the DNA. The state crime lab testified that the odds of the crime scene DNA matching someone other than Nicholas were 590 billion to 1. They also presented the items found in his home after the arrest. The defense argued there was nothing beyond the DNA. His attorney said it in closing, “Beyond the DNA, there is nothing.

” Drew Miller testified. >>  >> He’d been 12 years old when he saw a man walk out of those bushes in 1991. >>  >> He was now in his early 40s. He told the court that what he saw that day had stayed with him his whole life. When he’d been shown a photograph of Patrick Nicholas before the trial, he recognized him immediately.

 The same guy, just older. Evil eyes. Those evil eyes stayed the same. The jury deliberated for a day and a half. But the first verdict read aloud was not guilty on the premeditated murder charge. The courtroom tensed. Then the second came back guilty. First-degree  felony murder with sexual motivation. The third was also guilty,  second-degree murder, same finding.

Friends and family of Sarah let out tears and sighs  as the findings were read. Nicholas showed no visible reaction. He sat next  to his attorney and stared straight ahead. Two weeks later, the courtroom filled for sentencing. Dozens of people who had been involved in every part of Sarah’s case gathered back at  the courthouse.

Prosecutors asked for the maximum, 45 years and 8 months. The defense asked for 20. Laura Yarborough spoke first. She told the judge Sarah was her only daughter and the delight of her life. She and her husband had about three years after the murder that they don’t even remember. She could barely get out of bed.

 Their lives went from full color to a fuzzy gray. She never got to take Sarah shopping for a prom dress or a wedding gown, never got to see her fall in love or become a mother. “If Nicholas had still been in prison,” she said, “he wouldn’t have been around to kill their daughter.” After the sentencing, um Laura said she tries to give him as little space in her head as possible.

Sarah’s younger brother, Andrew, was 11 when she was killed. He stood in that courtroom and talked about the phone call, his father’s voice telling him Sarah  was dead, about lying in bed at night listening to his parents cry through the walls. Ann Crony stood at the podium and locked eyes with Nicholas.

She’d thought for years that justice had been served, that he’d done his time. She hadn’t known until 2019, when police knocked on her door after the arrest, that he’d served barely a third of his sentence. And she hadn’t known that the man she’d escaped  at the river had gone on to kill a 16-year-old girl.

When they told her, she said she was crushed. It had never occurred to her that what she escaped from was a murderer. “The system failed me, Sarah,” or her family and friends and countless others. Detective Hatch spoke last. He’d been one of the first officers at the scene in 1991 and had carried the case through his entire career.

  His partner, Jim Doyon, the original lead detective, had died before it was solved. Doyon had been part of the Green River Killer  Task Force and had spent years chasing leads on Sarah’s murder. Hatch was almost  70 now. He addressed Laura Yarborough directly from the podium and apologized that it took so long. Then he talked about Doyon.

“When his own time comes,” he said, “Doyon will be waiting  for him and he’ll ask if the case was solved.” And Hatch will tell him yes. Judge Josephine  Wiggs then read from some of the victim impact letters she’d received. Oh, one came from a neighbor of the Yarboroughs who remembered seeing the light go on in Sarah’s bedroom after her death.

It was Laura going into her daughter’s room to grieve. The neighbor wrote that all she wanted to do was hug her. Wiggs called the murder an outrageous violation of a child  and sentenced Nicholas to 45 years and 8 months. The courtroom let out a single whoop. Nicholas didn’t react and hadn’t said a word at any point  from the trial all the way through sentencing.

 He filed an appeal that same day. “There will be accountability, no matter how many years it takes, and today is that day.” As of now, no other murders have been connected to Patrick Nicholas. Sarah’s mother said after the sentencing that she doesn’t know how many other people were hurt during  the decades he was free and that she may never know.

 Oh, five known sexual assaults, a consistent method, and 32 years of freedom between his first attack and his arrest. Whether Sarah was his only murder victim is a question that hasn’t been answered. Sarah Yarborough was 16 years old. She told her mother she felt alive when she danced. The last morning of her life, she rushed out of her house because she thought she was late.

 She was an hour early and nobody else was there.