DNA Finally BROKE Washington’s Most Chilling Cold Case

On the freezing morning of December 14, 1991, the campus of Federal Way High School, located roughly twenty miles south of Seattle, Washington, stood quiet and unassuming. A local man jogging past the grounds noticed a figure kneeling over someone on the ground near a dense cluster of bushes. Assuming it was a young couple sharing a private moment, he maintained his pace and kept running, completely unaware that he had just jogged past a horrific crime scene in progress. The person on the ground was Sarah Yarborough, a sixteen-year-old junior at the school. She had arrived on campus a full hour before a scheduled drill team competition that had not yet begun, finding herself entirely alone in the crisp morning air.

By the time anyone realized she was missing, the tragedy had already reached its devastating conclusion. Sarah had been brutally beaten and strangled. Investigators responding to the grim discovery recovered a full, pristine DNA profile of the perpetrator that very same day. Law enforcement officials believed that having the killer’s genetic fingerprint meant an immediate, swift resolution. They anticipated a quick match in the databases, an arrest, and closure for a shattered community. Instead, they embarked on a staggering twenty-eight-year nightmare. The man who committed the atrocity was living a mere twenty minutes away the entire time, moving through society as an invisible ghost while generations of detectives fought a losing battle against time and technological limitations.

To understand the profound weight of what happened, one must look at the vibrant life that was snuffed out on that winter morning. Sarah Yarborough was much more than a statistic in a cold case file. Described by her mother, Laura, as an artistic and philosophical soul, Sarah was the kind of young woman who naturally put people at ease. She had a unique gift for building quiet bridges of empathy among her peers, standing firmly on the school’s honor roll while dedicating her energy to the drill team. Sarah once shared with her mother that she felt truly alive when she danced. She dreamed of college, hoping to venture out of state, expand her horizons, and experience the world beyond her hometown. In the spring, she planted flowers around her family’s home; in the evenings, she helped her younger brothers with their homework. She was sixteen years old, full of promise, and looking forward to a bright future that would never materialize.

On that fateful Saturday, Sarah believed she was running late for the morning drill team competition at another school. She rushed out of her home already wearing her uniform, with hot rollers still wound in her ponytail, and drove her father’s car to Federal Way High School. Arriving shortly after 8:00 AM, she discovered that the team was not scheduled to assemble for another hour. She was early, not late. Crucially, she was the only person on the entire campus. When her teammates arrived later that morning, Sarah’s car sat empty in the parking lot, but she was nowhere to be found. Assuming she had arrived separately or stepped away, they boarded the bus without her.

Her body was eventually discovered on a hillside near the tennis courts, tucked away in an overgrown embankment far from the parking lot, partially concealed by brush. No witnesses saw the fateful encounter between her car and that hillside. The grim discovery was made not by her teammates, but by two twelve-year-old boys taking a shortcut across the campus to go skateboarding. Drew Miller, who lived down the street from the school, and his friend noticed a strange man emerging from the bushes on the embankment, hurriedly heading in the opposite direction. The man kept glancing back nervously over his shoulder as he retreated. At the time, the young boys did not grasp the gravity of the encounter. They continued up the embankment and stumbled upon Sarah’s lifeless body.

She was partially undressed, bearing severe injuries to her face, with her legs scratched and dirtied from a violent struggle. She had been strangled with her own nylons, which remained tightly wrapped around her neck. In a final, desperate act of survival, Sarah had fought back fiercely, leaving the killer’s DNA trapped beneath her fingernails. Investigators also recovered a male DNA profile from seminal fluid found on her clothing. Between the fingernails and the clothing, the assailant had left an abundance of forensic evidence. All the police needed was a name to attach to the profile.

The jogger who had passed the campus earlier, along with Drew Miller and his friend, came forward after seeing news reports. Their detailed accounts enabled a police sketch artist to produce a composite of the suspect: a young man in his late teens or early twenty-something, featuring shaggy, dirty blonde hair and striking blue eyes. The sketch was plastered across the Federal Way area, followed later by an updated, more detailed composite derived from additional witness interviews. Armed with a complete DNA profile, eyewitness descriptions, and detailed composite sketches, detectives waited for a match that refused to materialize.

The DNA profile was entered into CODIS, the FBI’s national database of DNA profiles compiled from convicted felons. The system returned no match. Detectives began actively collecting DNA samples from potential suspects, individuals resembling the composite, and local men with criminal records, submitting them to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab for comparison. Over the years, nearly a hundred men were tested. Every single one was eliminated. Tips flooded in by the thousands, eventually surpassing four thousand by the time an arrest was finally made. Local media covered every anniversary and every fleeting development, while the community held its breath during every new lead, only to be met with repeated heartbreak.

The root of the impasse lay within the structural limitations of the database itself. CODIS contained only the profiles of individuals legally mandated to provide DNA samples following a conviction. Because those legal requirements had been established and expanded gradually over decades, anyone convicted of crimes before DNA collection became mandatory remained entirely absent from the system. A violent criminal could walk free with an extensive rap sheet and still remain a ghost in the national registry.

For years, dedicated investigators carried the torch of justice. Detective Jim Doyon, a highly respected homicide investigator and veteran of the notorious Green River Killer Task Force, poured years of effort into Sarah’s case, eventually retiring without finding the answers he sought. Detective Michael Hatch, who had been among the very first officers to respond to the gruesome crime scene in 1991, inherited the case and carried it with him for the remainder of his career. Meanwhile, DNA analyst Jody Sass at the State Patrol Crime Lab tested every new suspect sample as quickly as it arrived, having worked on the case since her earliest days as an analyst. Year after year, the results remained agonizingly unchanged.

Life marched forward outside the investigation. In 1993, students gathered in the courtyard of Federal Way High School to dedicate a memorial bench in Sarah’s honor, spearheaded by family friend Bill Fuller. Classmates graduated, went to college, built careers, and started families. The memorial bench remained on campus as a permanent fixture, and the case file stayed open, but in the hearts of those who loved her, Sarah remained forever sixteen.

A historic turning point arrived in 2011, twenty years after the murder. King County detectives decided to attempt something unprecedented in criminal history: they enlisted Colleen Fitzpatrick, a pioneer in the field of forensic genetic genealogy. They asked her to trace the killer’s family tree using consumer DNA databases—platforms where everyday people voluntarily upload ancestry test results to trace their heritage. Even if the killer had never taken a commercial DNA test himself, a distant cousin or relative might have. Fitzpatrick could then work backward through genealogical records to identify the bloodline.

Fitzpatrick successfully established a genetic connection. The DNA linked the unknown suspect’s lineage directly to Robert Fuller, an early American settler who had arrived on the Mayflower and established roots in Salem, Massachusetts, during the 1630s. The revelation meant the killer was a direct descendant of one of the oldest European families in American history. While it was the first major break in two decades and a groundbreaking application of a revolutionary technique, the family tree spanning four centuries was immense, branching out into thousands of descendants scattered across the nation. Fitzpatrick could not narrow the vast tree down to a single living individual, leaving the promising lead stalled for another eight years.

By September 2019, genealogical databases had grown exponentially, and analytical tools had advanced significantly. Fitzpatrick’s team renewed their efforts, working forward through the Fuller family tree, cross-referencing consumer DNA matches with public civil records, and finally narrowing the genetic pool to two brothers living in King County, Washington—the very same county where Sarah had lost her life. Both brothers were registered sex offenders and direct descendants of the Mayflower passenger.

Detectives checked one brother’s DNA profile, which was already stored in CODIS following a prior rape conviction, against the evidence from Sarah’s crime scene and promptly ruled him out. That left the second brother: Patrick Nicholas.

A deeper look into Nicholas’s past revealed a terrifying pattern of predatory behavior. Police uncovered records of at least five sexual assaults committed by Nicholas. His modus operandi was chillingly consistent: he targeted women who were alone near their vehicles, approached them with a knife, and forced them into secluded areas. Investigators concluded that he had similarly ambushed Sarah Yarborough, forcing her at knifepoint across the campus to the hidden hillside three hundred feet from her parked car—a desolate spot she had no logical reason to visit on her own.

His violent history extended back years before Sarah’s murder. In June 1983, eight years prior to the Federal Way tragedy, a twenty-one-year-old woman named Ann Crony had visited a park by the Columbia River in Richland, Washington, to sit by the water and reflect. While sitting in her car, a nineteen-year-old Patrick Nicholas approached, pressed a knife to her throat, and forced her to undress. He marched her out of the vehicle down an embankment toward the river. In a courageous bid for survival, Crony broke free, dove into the water, and swam across to safety. Nicholas was subsequently convicted of kidnapping and assault, receiving a ten-year prison sentence.

He served a mere three and a half years. Prison evaluation files noted no major disciplinary infractions, and a clinical assessment deemed him safe to release under outpatient sex offender treatment supervision. He walked free in 1987. Ann Crony was never notified of his release, operating under the lifelong assumption that her attacker was serving his full ten-year sentence behind bars—a sentence that should have kept him locked away until 1993. Instead, Nicholas was free on the streets in December 1991 when he murdered Sarah Yarborough. Three years after taking Sarah’s life, in 1994, he went on to sexually assault a minor. Because none of these convictions mandated DNA sample collection under Washington state law at the time, his profile never entered CODIS. He remained completely invisible to the dedicated detectives hunting him for decades. Furthermore, Washington state laws did not permit familial DNA searches at the time, keeping his brother’s database entry from pointing authorities straight to him.

Armed with the genetic genealogy breakthrough, detectives initiated round-the-clock surveillance on Patrick Nicholas in the fall of 2019. Over a weekend, they tracked his daily routines, waiting for a discreet opportunity to collect biological material containing his DNA without his knowledge. Their chance came at a laundromat in Kent, Washington. Detectives watched as Nicholas stepped outside to smoke two cigarettes, dropping the spent butts onto a napkin on the ground before returning inside. The moment he stepped away, officers moved in, secured the cigarette butts, and rushed them to the state patrol crime lab.

Within days, the scientific verdict was delivered: the DNA extracted from the cigarette butts was an exact match to the genetic profile recovered from Sarah Yarborough’s clothing in 1991.

On the evening of October 2, 2019, Patrick Nicholas was arrested at a business in Kent. He was fifty-five years old, residing in a dilapidated building on a large property in Covington with virtually no social ties to his community. Bail was set at five million dollars. During his subsequent police interrogation, detectives informed him that they were investigating the murder of Sarah Yarborough. Nicholas looked at the officers and asked a telling question: “What year is this?” Detectives immediately noted the betrayal in the question. An innocent person wrongfully accused does not ask what year an alleged crime took place; a guilty perpetrator who has buried a secret for decades instantly calculates how much time has passed. Nicholas maintained a cold front and offered no further substantive words.

When investigators executed a search warrant on his home, they uncovered disturbing items hidden away: a torn magazine photograph of a woman in a cheerleading outfit tucked inside a kitchen drawer, and a preserved newspaper from 1994 featuring a front-page article detailing the Sarah Yarborough murder investigation. He had kept the clipping for twenty-five years as a dark keepsake. Despite nearly four thousand tips pouring in over nearly three decades, not a single one had ever pointed toward Patrick Nicholas. He had never been a suspect or even questioned until genetic genealogy ripped open the veil of anonymity.

In the spring of 2023, more than thirty-one years after Sarah’s life was stolen, Patrick Nicholas stood trial at the Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent. He was fifty-nine years old, maintaining a plea of not guilty throughout the proceedings. In a controversial pre-trial ruling, the judge determined that Nicholas’s extensive criminal history—including the 1983 attack on Ann Crony and his early release—could not be admitted into evidence, ruling that it would be unfairly prejudicial to the jury. Consequently, the jury would hear no mention of his patterned assaults against women near their vehicles. The prosecution’s case rested entirely on the irrefutable DNA evidence and corroborating clues gathered from the original crime scene.

Sarah’s childhood friends, who had known her since elementary school, attended the grueling three-week trial, sitting through agonizing testimony detailing the precise mechanics of her death. The state crime lab presented definitive genetic testimony establishing that the probability of the crime scene DNA belonging to anyone other than Nicholas was a staggering 590 billion to 1. The prosecution also presented the items recovered from his home, painting a portrait of calculated obsession.

Drew Miller took the stand. Now an adult in his early forties, Miller recounted the morning in 1991 when he was a twelve-year-old boy watching a man emerge from the bushes. When shown a photograph of Patrick Nicholas prior to the trial, Miller recognized him instantly: the same man, older, bearing the very same chilling eyes that had haunted his memory for decades.

The jury deliberated for a day and a half. When the verdicts were finally read aloud in the tense courtroom, the first reading brought a wave of anxiety: not guilty on the premeditated murder charge. The atmosphere grew heavy before the second verdict echoed through the room: guilty of first-degree felony murder with sexual motivation. The third verdict confirmed the same finding for second-degree murder. Tears of relief and collective sighs escaped from Sarah’s family and friends. Nicholas sat motionless beside his defense counsel, staring straight ahead with an unreadable expression.

Two weeks later, the courtroom filled to capacity for the sentencing hearing. Prosecutors pressed for the maximum penalty of forty-five years and eight months, while the defense requested twenty. Laura Yarborough spoke first, addressing the court with profound grief. She explained that Sarah was her only daughter and the radiant light of her life. In the immediate aftermath of the murder, she and her husband endured three years of blank trauma, barely able to get out of bed as their vibrant world shifted permanently into a muted, agonizing gray. She was robbed of every milestone—shopping for prom dresses, watching her daughter fall in love, and experiencing the joy of grandchildren. “If Nicholas had still been in prison,” Laura remarked, “he wouldn’t have been around to kill our daughter.”

Sarah’s younger brother, Andrew, who was eleven when his sister was murdered, stood at the podium and recounted the devastating phone call from his father delivering the news, and the lingering trauma of lying awake at night listening to his parents weeping through the bedroom walls.

Ann Crony stepped up to the microphone and locked eyes directly with Patrick Nicholas. For decades, she had believed justice was fully served by her attacker’s initial conviction, remaining entirely unaware until police knocked on her door in 2019 that he had served barely a fraction of his sentence. Learning that the man she had escaped at the river had subsequently murdered a sixteen-year-old girl crushed her spirit. “The system failed me, Sarah, her family, and countless others,” she stated.

Detective Michael Hatch spoke last. Having served as a young responding officer in 1991 and carried the case through his entire career, Hatch reflected on his late partner, Jim Doyon, who had passed away before seeing the case solved. Addressing Laura Yarborough directly, Hatch apologized for the agonizing length of time it took to find answers, vowing that when Doyon’s time came, he would share the news that Sarah’s case was finally closed.

Judge Josephine Wiggs delivered a powerful condemnation of the crime, labeling it an outrageous violation of an innocent child, and formally sentenced Patrick Nicholas to forty-five years and 8 months in prison. A solitary cheer echoed through the courtroom as the sentence was handed down, while Nicholas remained silent, offering no words of remorse before filing an appeal that very same day.

While no other murders have been formally linked to Patrick Nicholas, the scope of his decades of freedom remains a haunting question. With five known sexual assaults, a chillingly consistent method, and thirty-two years of unmonitored freedom between his first attack and his ultimate arrest, the true number of lives he shattered may never be fully known. Yet, the resolution of Sarah Yarborough’s case stands as an enduring testament to the relentless pursuit of justice. Science and unwavering human dedication pulled a dark secret out of the shadows, proving that no matter how many decades pass, truth and accountability will eventually find their day in the light.