On the morning of December 14th, 1991, two 13-year-old boys cutting through the grounds of Federal Way High School in Washington found a girl lying in the dirt behind a set of bushes near an old dugout. She was wearing a drill team uniform. Curlers were still in her hair. Her car was parked 300 ft away in the back lot.
On the passenger seat, a container of orange juice sat upright and untouched. Investigators recovered a full male DNA profile from her clothing that day. They had two eyewitnesses who had seen a man walking away from the body minutes earlier. They had a composite sketch within the week. Over the next 28 years, more than 4,000 tips came in.
The DNA was checked against the FBI’s national database every time it expanded. Not a single match ever came back. The man who killed her had been sentenced to 10 years in prison for attacking a woman at knife point in 1983. He served three and a half. If he had stayed locked for the full term, he would have still been sitting in a cell on the morning she drove to school.
After his release, the system had three separate opportunities to collect his DNA across three decades. Three times it didn’t. Her name was Sara Yarborough. She was 16 years old, an honor student who had traveled to New Zealand at 15, and kept a two-word motto written everywhere she could put it. Carpe diem. Seize the day. It took 28 years, a DNA trail that stretched back to a man who arrived on the Mayflower in the 1630s, and two cigarette butts discarded on a sidewalk outside a laundromat to finally put a name to the face in the sketch. Before we go any
further, if you’re new here, this channel covers cold cases that took decades to solve. Subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. And if you stay until the end of this one, you’ll understand why it took 28 years and a DNA trail stretching back to the 1630s to finally close it. Now, back to the case. Sarah lived with her parents and two younger brothers in Federal Way, Washington.
She was a member of the school’s drill team, active in her church youth group, and danced with a traveling performance group called The Safety Kids that had taken her to New Zealand the year before. She hadn’t decided what she wanted to be yet. She was choosing between museum curator and engineer. Her mother was secretly hoping for the museum curator.
On Friday, December 13th, Sarah’s family left town for her younger brother’s soccer game in Ocean Shores, about 2 hours away. Sarah stayed behind. She had her drill team competition the next morning, and her weekend was already mapped out. Her parents agreed to let her stay on one condition: a friend had to come over and sleep at the house.
Sarah and the friend went to a basketball game that Friday night, stopped for fast food on the way home, and stayed up the way 16-year-old girls do on a Friday. Nothing about the evening felt wrong. Saturday morning, Sarah looked at the clock and panicked. She thought she was late. She threw on her drill team uniform, left the curlers in her hair, said a quick goodbye to her friend, and drove her father’s car to Federal Way High School.
She pulled into the back parking lot just after 8:09 a.m. and parked. The drill team wasn’t scheduled to meet until 9:00. She was almost an hour early. The parking lot was empty. The school was quiet. It was a Saturday morning in December, and the temperature was below freezing. Ice had formed in the puddles overnight.
Sarah sat in the car alone, waiting, with a container of orange juice on the seat beside her. Somewhere nearby, someone was already there. Two blocks from the school, a 13-year-old named Drew Miller had spent Friday night at his house with a friend named Adam. Saturday morning, they did what every kid did in 1991.
They watched cartoons, ate cereal, and eventually decided to go skateboarding. To get to a grocery store parking lot nearby, they took a shortcut they had used dozens of times before. They hopped the fence at the edge of the school campus and walked straight through the grounds. The air was cold enough that the puddles from the night before had frozen solid.
The boys stomped on the ice as they walked. It cracked under their shoes like breaking glass. They were laughing. Then Drew looked up. 30 or 40 yards ahead, a man stepped out of the bushes. He came up from a low area near what had been a dugout, surrounded by thick brush tall enough to hide a person completely. The man stood up straight, looked directly at the two boys, and then turned and started walking in the same direction they were heading. He didn’t say a word.
Drew felt something wrong, but couldn’t name it. He told himself the guy had probably just been hiding in the bushes to smoke. They kept walking. When they reached the spot where the man had come from, they looked down into the low area and saw a girl lying in the dirt. She wasn’t moving. Her eyes were open.
The scene made clear that she had been attacked with extreme violence. Drew looked back up. The man had stopped further ahead near a vehicle. He had turned around. He was staring directly at the two boys. Drew would later call that look the most terrifying thing he had ever experienced. He called the man the boogeyman, a real one, standing in the morning light watching two 13-year-old boys who had just found what he had left behind. The boys ran.
They sprinted back across the campus over the fence and into Drew’s house. His mother saw their faces and called 911 immediately. Drew’s stepfather drove back to the scene with him. There was nothing anyone could do. She was gone. But the boys were not the first people to see something wrong that morning. Earlier, before Drew and Adam had even left the house, a jogger running near the tennis courts on campus had looked over and seen a girl lying on the ground with a man kneeling over her.
He assumed they were a couple. He kept running. By the time he understood what he had actually seen, it was too late. Police arrived within minutes. They identified the victim from her clothing. Sarah Yarborough. Her car was still sitting in the lot, 300 ft from where her body was found. The orange juice on the passenger seat hadn’t been touched.
No signs of a struggle anywhere near the vehicle. No broken glass, no scuff marks, no marks on the ground. Whatever happened to Sarah, it didn’t start at her car. She had walked or been forced to walk 100 yd into the bushes. The medical examiner determined the cause of death was strangulation. She had been sexually assaulted.
DNA was recovered from her clothing. A full male profile was developed from the evidence. DNA was also found beneath Sarah’s fingernails and it matched the profile from her clothing. She had scratched her attacker. She had fought back. A 16-year-old girl in a drill team uniform had fought with everything she had and in doing so, she left a piece of her attacker behind.
Evidence that would sit in a lab for 28 years waiting. Within hours of the murder, police had a composite sketch. Drew Miller and Adam sat with an artist and described the man in detail. White, around 6 ft tall, medium build. But the feature both boys remembered most was his skin. Rough, uneven, textured, like acne scarring or like something was visibly wrong with the surface of his face.
It was noticeable even from a distance. Both boys said the sketch was highly accurate. The drawing was released to the public immediately. It went up in store windows, on telephone poles, in every business in Federal Way. It ran on the news and in the papers. The tips started coming in. Hundreds at first, then thousands.
By the time the full investigation was underway, more than 3,000 tips had been submitted to the King County Sheriff’s Office. The volume was so large that Sarah’s own grandfather facilitated the donation of a computer system to the department just so they could track all of it. Detectives canvassed the area around Federal Way High School on foot.
They interviewed students, teachers, neighbors, delivery drivers. They ran fingerprints found at the scene against every available database. They checked known violent offenders and sex offenders in the King County area. They pulled records, cross-referenced names, and followed up on every call that came in.
None of it produced a viable suspect. 3,000 tips and not one of them led to an arrest. The DNA from Sarah’s clothing was submitted to CODIS, the FBI’s national database of genetic profiles from convicted offenders. If the man who left the DNA had been convicted of a qualifying offense and had his sample collected, the system would flag a match automatically.
Nothing came back. Detectives ran it again every time the database expanded. Every time a new state added mandatory DNA collection. Every time the technology improved, they re- submitted. The result was always the same. The unknown male was not in the system. Federal Way was living in fear. Parents tightened curfews.
Families double-bolted their locks. People looked at their neighbors differently because the man in that sketch could have been anyone. The sketch stayed pinned to bulletin boards and taped to windows across the city for years, but the face never got a name. Laura Yarborough described the years after the murder plainly.
She said she and her husband lost about three years of their lives that they don’t even remember. She could barely get out of bed. Their world went from full color to a fuzzy gray. Andrew, Sarah’s youngest brother, was 11 when she died. What he remembered most was the pain in his father’s voice over the phone telling him Sarah was gone.
He remembered lying in bed at night listening to his parents cry through the walls. On June 12th, 1993, a memorial was unveiled in the courtyard of Federal Way High School. A stone bench inscribed with two words, “carpe diem.” Encased in bronze around it were some of the things Sarah had loved: her ballet shoes, her books, a small replica of her dog Gibby.
A family friend named Bill Fuller had led the effort to build it. His daughter had been in Sarah’s class. He stood beside Sarah’s brother Andrew as it was unveiled. That same day, the class Sarah was supposed to graduate with walked across the stage. It was also what would have been Sarah’s 18th birthday.
A year passed, then five, then 10. The sketch stayed on the walls, but the calls slowed down. The detectives who had worked the original investigation moved to new assignments or retired. New officers inherited the file. The evidence sat in storage. The DNA profile sat in CODIS, running automatically against every new entry, returning the same result every time: no match. Laura kept waiting.
There were times she gave up hope, times she thought the case would is never be solved. But the detectives working it kept telling her the same thing, that the technology would catch up eventually, that one day science would do what traditional investigation couldn’t. In 2011, 20 years after Sarah’s death, a detective named Jim Allen made a phone call that would eventually change the course of the case.
He reached out to a woman named Colleen Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick ran a company called Identifinders International, and she was doing something that almost no one in law enforcement had heard of. She was using consumer DNA databases, the kind ordinary people use to trace their family history, to generate investigative leads for unsolved crimes.
The field didn’t have a proper name yet. Forensic genetic genealogy was in its infancy. Fitzpatrick herself would later say that police thought she was crazy. She described being almost laughed out of the room when she tried to explain what she could do. But the King County Sheriff’s Office had been working Sarah’s case for two decades.
They had tried everything else. When Fitzpatrick offered to look at the DNA from the crime scene for free, they said yes. Fitzpatrick took the crime scene profile and compared it against profiles in public genealogy databases, focusing on the Y chromosome, the genetic marker passed from father to son virtually unchanged across generations.
She found a match, not to the killer himself, but to his family line. The Y chromosome from Sarah’s crime scene matched a group of people who were all descendants of the same man. Robert Fuller, who had lived in Salem, Massachusetts in the 1630s. His family had come to North America on the Mayflower.
It was the first time in history that a cold case had generated investigative leads using consumer DNA databases. But Robert Fuller had lived nearly four centuries ago. He had thousands of living descendants. The family name was a start. It wasn’t enough. That Then the name Fuller triggered something with detectives because they already knew a Fuller.
Bill Fuller, the family friend, the man who had built the memorial bench in the school courtyard. Elise asked Bill Fuller for a DNA sample. He didn’t hesitate. He walked in and gave it willingly. His DNA was not a match to the crime scene. Bill Fuller did not kill Sarah Yarborough. But his Y chromosome, the part that traces the paternal line, was a match.
He and Sarah’s killer shared the same ancestry. They were both descendants of Robert Fuller from the 1630s. Distant paternal cousins. Too distant to narrow down a suspect, but the connection was real. Other people with the Fuller surname in the area were investigated. None were tied to the case. The lead dried up and the case went cold again. But Fitzpatrick didn’t stop.
She kept working in the background year after year, and the technology kept evolving around her. In 2018, the Golden State Killer was identified and arrested using the same kind of DNA database comparison that Fitzpatrick had pioneered on Sarah’s case. That arrest changed everything. It proved to the world that genetic genealogy worked.
Fitzpatrick’s team went back to Sarah’s case with better tools and bigger databases. In September 2019, 8 years after Fitzpatrick first started working the case, her team identified two brothers, Edward Nicholas and Patrick Nicholas. Both were distant cousins of Bill Fuller. Both were descendants of Robert Fuller from Salem.
But their last name wasn’t Fuller. Their grandfather had been adopted. Born into the Fuller bloodline, but raised under a different name. The genetic connection had been hidden behind a legal name change that happened generations ago. That was why no one had ever found them. Edward Nicholas was a convicted offender. His DNA had been in CODIS since 2005.
Detectives compared it to the crime scene profile. It wasn’t a match. That left one person, his younger brother, Patrick Leon Nicholas. Patrick was not in CODIS. Despite a history of violent offenses stretching back to his teenage years, his DNA had never been entered into any criminal database.
Three separate times the system had an opportunity to collect it. Three times it didn’t. Detectives believed they had their man, but believing wasn’t proof. They needed his DNA without him knowing. On September 29th, 2019, a team of undercover detectives began following a 55-year-old man through the streets of a small town south of Seattle.
Nicholas was living alone in a building with no working electricity in Covington, Washington. He worked at an auto parts store and took the bus everywhere. He had no children, no friends, no connections to anyone. His bus route passed directly by Federal Way High School. They trailed him to a laundromat near a strip mall in Kent.
He went inside to do his laundry. After a while, he stepped outside, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it. He smoked it slowly. Then he lit another one. When he was finished, he dropped both butts on the sidewalk. A paper napkin slipped from his pocket and fell beside them. He didn’t pick any of it up. He walked back inside.
The moment he was out of sight, the undercover team moved in. They collected both cigarette butts and the napkin. Three pieces of garbage that a man had thrown away without thinking twice. They bagged them, sealed them, and sent them to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab. The DNA on the cigarette butts matched the DNA found on Sara Yarborough’s clothing in 1991.
The odds of it being anyone else were 1 in 120 quadrillion. 28 years of dead ends, and the answer came from two cigarette butts on a sidewalk outside a laundromat. Patrick Leon Nicholas was 55 years old when detective arrested him at a sports bar in Kent on October 2nd, 2019. He was living alone in a run-down building in Covington, Washington with no working electricity.
He worked at an auto parts store and took the bus everywhere because he didn’t drive. He had no children, no close friends, no connections to anyone. From the outside, he was invisible. A man living on the edges of society in the same part of Washington state where he had killed a 16-year-old girl 28 years earlier. His bus route passed directly by Federal Way High School.
But Patrick Nicholas was no stranger to law enforcement. His record began before Sara was born. As a juvenile, he was convicted for attacking two women and the attempted assault of a third. His method was the same every time. He would approach a woman near her vehicle. He would make small talk to get her comfortable. Then he would pull a knife.
He would force her to walk to a secluded area where no one could see them. That was his pattern. That was who he was before he turned 18. In June of 1983, 8 years before Sara’s death, a 21-year-old woman named Ann Crony was sitting by the Columbia River in Richland, Washington. A young man walked up and struck up a conversation. He said his name was Pat.
He was friendly. He told her he had just moved to the area. Ann asked if he had been water skiing on the river yet. He said no, he couldn’t swim. They talked for a few minutes. Then Ann noticed his voice changing. Something underneath the surface was shifting. She told him she had to go.
She turned toward her car and he put a knife to her neck. He started walking her down toward the riverbank, away from the road, away from anyone who might see. Halfway down the bank, Ann remembered one detail from their conversation. He couldn’t swim. She ran for the water and dove in. She swam as hard as she could. He stood on the bank and watched.
He couldn’t follow. People at a nearby dock pulled her out and called the police. Nicholas was arrested. During the interview, he told investigators something they would never forget. He said he realized he had dangerous impulses toward young women and that his intent that day was to commit a serious assault. He told them it wasn’t right.
He said he wanted help. The judge sentenced him to 10 years. Ann walked out of that courtroom believing he would serve every day of it. He served three and a half. By 1987, he was out. An evaluation had described him as someone who would be safe to be at large. No one tracked where he went or what he did after that.
Ann didn’t know he had been released. She thought the system had done its job. If Patrick Nicholas had served his full 10-year sentence, he would not have been released until 1993. He would have still been in a cell on the morning of December 14th, 1991. Sarah Yarborough would have driven to school, realized she was early, waited for her teammates, boarded the bus to Kirkland, and competed with her drill team that afternoon.
Detectives told Ann about Sarah’s murder in 2019, she said something she would repeat many times in the years that followed. She said it had never occurred to her that what she escaped from was a murderer. In the interrogation room after his arrest, Nicholas didn’t react the way an innocent person would.
He didn’t say they had the wrong man. He asked the question. He asked what year this happened as if there were multiple years it could have been. As if there were multiple girls. That question hung in the room and it made detectives wonder whether Sarah was the only one. He spoke with them for about 90 minutes. He didn’t confess.
Then he asked for a lawyer and shut down completely. When detectives searched his home, they found stacks of old newspapers covering almost every surface. Among them was a newspaper from 1994 with an article about Sarah Yarborough’s case on the front page. He had kept it for 25 years. In a kitchen drawer, they found a photograph of a young woman in a cheerleading outfit torn carefully from a magazine and placed there by itself.
The trial began on April 17th, 2023, more than 31 years after the murder. The judge ruled that Nicholas’ criminal history, the juvenile convictions, the attack on Ann Cronin, a later offense against a child, could not be presented to the jury. The 12 people deciding his fate would never know about the pattern.
The prosecution built their case on the DNA. 13 out of 13 genetic markers matched from Sarah’s clothing. The probability of it being someone else, 1 in 120 quadrillion. The DNA from under Sarah’s fingernails, the DNA she had torn from her attacker as she fought for her life, was 590 billion times more likely to have come from Nicholas than from any unrelated person.
The defense attacked the genetic genealogy as untested. The defense attorney called the technology wacky. He also pointed to the boy’s description of the man having rough, uneven skin on his face, arguing that Nicholas had clear skin. The prosecution’s response was direct. Sarah had scratched her attacker. The DNA under her fingernails proved it.
What the boy saw on the man’s face that morning may not have been acne scarring. It may have been fresh scratch marks left by a 16-year-old girl who fought until she couldn’t fight anymore. The jury deliberated for a day and a half. Not guilty on premeditated first-degree murder. Guilty on first-degree felony murder. Guilty on second-degree murder.
Special verdict. Sexually motivated. The courtroom broke. Sarah’s family and friends sobbed openly. Drew Miller, the boy who found her body at 13, looked across the room and made eye contact with a juror. The juror nodded at him. 32 years, and that small gesture carried the weight of all of it. At the sentencing 2 weeks later, Laura stood at the podium and called Sarah the delight of her life.
Andrew told the court that Nicholas does not possess the ability to feel remorse the way normal people do. Then Ann Crony stood up. The woman who had escaped Patrick Nicholas by jumping into the Columbia River 40 years earlier. The woman whose testimony the judge had barred from the trial. She had come to say what she had not been allowed to say before.
When she rose from her seat, Nicholas, who had shown zero emotion through the entire trial, who hadn’t moved during the guilty verdicts, who had sat blank-faced through 9 days of testimony, did a double take. His body visibly shuddered. He recognized her. After 40 years, he never expected to see her face again. Ann told the court what he had done to her.
The knife, the river, the swim. Then she said, “We rely on a system of justice designed to protect us from predators like Nicholas. And this system failed. It failed Sarah, her family, her friends, and countless others.” She asked the court not to make the same mistake. Judge Josephine Wiggs sentenced Patrick Nicholas to 548 months, 45 years and 8 months.
He was 59 years old. He would almost certainly die behind bars. Before she delivered the sentence, Wiggs spoke about Sara. She called her a child. She said, “When I think about this poor child, what she experienced fighting for her life.” And as she said it, she brought her fist down on the bench. The sound carried through the courtroom like a verdict of its own.
Sara Yarborough was 16 years old. She was an honor student who had traveled to New Zealand at 15 and wanted to see more of the world. She had two younger brothers and a dog named Gibby and a two-word motto she kept written everywhere she could put it. On a freezing December morning in 1991, she drove to school with curlers still in her hair because she thought she was late. She wasn’t. She was early.
And in that empty parking lot with a container of orange juice sitting on the seat beside her, she was completely alone. Carpe diem, seize the day. She seized everyone she had. And 32 years later, the people she left behind seized the one that mattered most. If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments.
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Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
