On December 14, 1991, 16‑year‑old Sarah Yarborough drove to Federal Way High School, dressed for drill team practice. She parked and waited; within an hour her body was found on school grounds, partly unclothed and strangled with nylon stockings. A young neighbor who cut through the school that morning, Drew Miller, had seen a man leave the bushes where Sarah’s body lay and later recognized him at the scene. Investigators recovered semen and a full male DNA profile from Sarah’s clothing, and witnesses provided sketches of a man seen near the bushes.
From the beginning the killing felt like a betrayal of a safe community. Sarah was remembered by family and friends as bright, artistic, kind and full of plans for college and travel. Her parents, Tom and Laura Yarborough, and her younger brothers were devastated; a memorial bench and park plaque later bore the words “Carpe Diem,” a phrase Sarah had lived by.
Police treated the slaying as a sexually motivated murder and assigned major‑crimes detectives. Early hopes that a large body of evidence — DNA, eyewitness sketches, the victim’s car in the parking lot — would quickly identify a suspect faded as leads petered out. Over the next decades investigators took thousands of tips, ran the unknown profile through CODIS as the national database grew, and kept the case active as new technologies emerged.
In 2011 the King County Sheriff’s Office turned to Colleen Fitzpatrick, a pioneer in forensic genetic genealogy, who used public genetic databases and family‑tree research to trace the unknown killer’s profile into a family tree. Her early work pointed to the surname Fuller. That was not a final identification, but it created a new line of investigation. Fitzpatrick’s team continued to refine the genetic genealogy, and advances in the field after 2018 — especially the high‑profile Golden State Killer identification — boosted investigators’ confidence that the technique could yield a suspect.
Fitzpatrick’s research eventually narrowed the search to two brothers, Edward and Patrick Nicholas, distant relatives through the Fuller line. Edward’s DNA was already in CODIS and proved not to match the crime scene. The focus then shifted to Patrick Leon Nicholas, then living alone and working in auto parts.
Undercover detectives placed Nicholas under surveillance and in September 2019 collected discarded cigarette butts and other items from which they could extract DNA. Laboratory comparison returned a match: the DNA from the cigarette butt matched the profile recovered from Sarah Yarborough’s clothing. Patrick Nicholas was arrested and charged in the decades‑old murder.
Nicholas’s criminal history complicated the story. In 1983 he had approached and attacked Anne Croney, threatening her with a knife and attempting sexual assault. He was convicted of attempted rape, but served only about three and a half years of a ten‑year sentence and was released years before Sarah’s killing in 1991. Investigators later documented other sexual assaults and convictions for Patrick Nicholas in the early 1990s and beyond. Many of those prior offenses had not resulted in DNA entries in CODIS, which helped explain why the Yarborough DNA profile had no earlier match. Fitzpatrick’s genealogy work essentially bridged that gap by pointing investigators to Nicholas’s family tree.
At trial, prosecutors relied on the DNA match — they reported the odds were astronomically small that the crime‑scene DNA belonged to anyone but Nicholas — and on physical evidence found in his home in 2019, including pornography stacks, newspapers about the Yarborough case, and a torn photograph of a magazine image of a woman in a cheerleading outfit. Defense counsel challenged the new‑technology genealogy methods and urged skepticism about the initial investigative steps, but jurors had to weigh that cross‑examination against the direct DNA match obtained from Nicholas’s discarded items.
The trial, held more than 30 years after Sarah’s death, brought many survivors and witnesses back into court: Drew Miller and his friend who found the body, former victims who described attacks by Nicholas, investigators who had worked the cold case for decades, and members of Sarah’s family and drill team, who attended in force. The jury convicted Patrick Nicholas of first‑degree murder with sexual motivation and other charges. He received a sentence of nearly 46 years.
The verdict and sentence brought mixed emotions. For Sarah’s family and friends, there was relief that a man had been held accountable after three decades of uncertainty and fear. There was also anger at the system that allowed a repeat predator to be free for years: friends and other victims recalled missed opportunities and early releases that left Nicholas in the community. Anne Croney, who had survived Nicholas’s earlier attack and whose testimony and presence at sentencing were impactful, said the justice system had failed her and Sarah by not keeping Nicholas in custody longer on earlier convictions.
Investigators and prosecutors noted that forensic genetic genealogy was the turning point in the case. They argued that familial DNA searches — comparing the crime‑scene profile to profiles in CODIS for possible relatives — could have identified Nicholas earlier if statutory legal authority to conduct such searches had existed or had been used differently in their jurisdiction. Some states allow such familial searches; others do not. Whether changes in law or policy might prevent such prolonged cold cases remains a public debate, and the Yarborough family expressed a desire for laws that could shorten the wait for answers in similar cases.
The case left deep, lasting scars. Sarah’s friends and family described decades of grief, survivor guilt, and a lost sense of safety for a community and for a generation of students. Trial reunions with friends and other witnesses offered some measure of closure, but many acknowledged the complex mixture of relief and sorrow that follows the arrival of a verdict so many years later.
Sarah Yarborough’s legacy in her community is both the memory of a promising young life and a call to improve how agencies use science, databases and legal tools to solve violent crimes. Her friends say they hope her case can help other families avoid a decades‑long wait.