A 16-YEAR-OLD GIRL ARRIVED AT SCHOOL AN HOUR EARLY AND NEVER CAME HOME—THEN A 400-YEAR-OLD FAMILY TREE FINALLY NAMED THE MAN WHO KILLED HER

A 16-YEAR-OLD GIRL ARRIVED AT SCHOOL AN HOUR EARLY AND NEVER CAME HOME—THEN A 400-YEAR-OLD FAMILY TREE FINALLY NAMED THE MAN WHO KILLED HER

On the night of October 2, 2019, Laura Yarborough received the news she had spent nearly three decades believing might never come.

Detectives told her they had identified the man responsible for killing her 16-year-old daughter, Sarah.

For twenty-eight years, Laura had lived with an unanswered question attached to every birthday, every holiday, every family milestone Sarah should have reached. Investigators had thousands of tips. They had eyewitnesses. They had a DNA profile. They even had a sketch of the man two boys had seen leaving the place where Sarah died.

What they never had was his name.

Until science traced him through a family line stretching back nearly four centuries.

The answer began with a discarded cigarette outside a laundromat.

But the story of how Patrick Leon Nicholas finally came under surveillance in 2019 began much earlier, on a freezing Saturday morning in December 1991, when Sarah Yarborough made one ordinary mistake.

She thought she was late.

Sarah had been born in Portland, Oregon, on June 12, 1975. Her family moved to Federal Way, Washington, when she was eight.

By high school, she had become the kind of teenager people remembered for more than her bright red hair.

She was an honor student at Federal Way High School. She liked math, science, art and reading. She was on the drill team and active in her church youth group. She also performed with a youth group called the Safety Kids, which had taken her to New Zealand when she was only fifteen.

Sarah wanted to see more of the world.

She had told her mother she did not want to stay close to home for college. She imagined going somewhere new. She had not settled on a career, but two possibilities appealed to her: becoming a museum curator or becoming an engineer like her father.

Her mother quietly favored the museum idea.

Yet the quality people spoke about most after Sarah was gone was not her grades or ambition.

It was her kindness.

She helped her younger brothers with homework. She noticed when people needed something. She did not require attention for helping them.

Laura called Sarah the delight of her life.

Sarah also had a personal motto: carpe diem.

Seize the day.

On Friday, December 13, 1991, the Yarborough family was preparing to leave Federal Way for the weekend. One of Sarah’s younger brothers had a soccer game in Ocean Shores, roughly two hours away.

The rest of the family planned to go.

Sarah wanted to stay.

Her drill team had a competition Saturday morning, and she had other plans that weekend. Laura was uncomfortable leaving her sixteen-year-old daughter home alone, so the family agreed Sarah could remain behind if a friend stayed with her.

That Friday night, Sarah went to a basketball game with friends.

Afterward, she and the friend spending the night stopped for fast food and snacks, then returned to Sarah’s house.

Nothing about the evening appeared unusual.

They were two teenagers ending a normal Friday night.

The next morning, December 14, Sarah woke and looked at the time.

She panicked.

Her drill team was supposed to meet at Federal Way High School before traveling to Juanita High School in Kirkland for a competition. Believing she was running late, Sarah rushed to get ready.

She put on her drill-team uniform.

She left the curlers in her red hair.

She hurried out of the house and drove her father’s car to the school.

Around 8:00 a.m., she pulled into the back parking lot.

Then she discovered the problem.

Sarah was not late.

She was nearly an hour early.

The team was not supposed to gather until around nine.

So Sarah sat alone in the car.

A large container of orange juice she had prepared that morning rested on the passenger seat.

Outside, the school was nearly deserted.

Puddles had frozen overnight. The campus was quiet. It was one of those cold winter mornings when a place built for hundreds of teenagers can suddenly feel enormous when no one is there.

Somewhere between that car and the school grounds, Sarah encountered a man.

Exactly how the encounter began would remain uncertain for decades.

What investigators eventually came to believe was that Sarah did not simply decide to wander away from the parking lot.

Her car offered the first clue.

When police later examined it, they found no evidence of a struggle inside or immediately around it.

The orange juice was still upright on the passenger seat.

Nothing suggested the sudden chaos that would normally accompany someone being dragged out of a vehicle.

Yet roughly 300 feet away, behind the school, something terrible was already happening.

Two thirteen-year-old boys were about to walk directly into its aftermath.

Drew Miller had a friend named Adam staying at his house that weekend. That morning, the boys watched cartoons, ate cereal and eventually decided to go skateboarding.

There was an Albertsons nearby with a parking lot they liked, and cutting across the grounds of Federal Way High School gave them a shortcut.

They climbed the fence and crossed the campus.

The frozen puddles cracked beneath their shoes.

Then Drew noticed a man coming out of a low area near thick bushes by what had once been a dugout.

The man stopped.

He looked at them.

Then he began walking away in the same direction the boys were heading.

Something about him bothered Drew.

At thirteen, he did not have a clear explanation for the feeling. He tried to make the scene ordinary in his own mind. Maybe the man had simply been hiding in the bushes to smoke.

The boys continued forward.

When they reached the place the man had just left, they saw a young woman lying on the ground.

She was motionless.

They understood almost immediately that something was terribly wrong.

Then Drew looked toward the man again.

He had stopped farther away near a vehicle.

He was looking directly back at the boys.

Years later, Drew would describe him as a real-life boogeyman.

The boys ran.

They sprinted across the campus, climbed back over the fence and raced to Drew’s house.

Drew’s mother saw their panic and called 911.

His stepfather went back with Drew to see whether the young woman could be helped.

She could not.

Police arrived.

Clothing at the scene helped identify the victim.

The girl lying behind Federal Way High School was Sarah Yarborough.

The teenager who had rushed out that morning believing she was late had been killed before most of her teammates even arrived.

Her father’s car remained in the parking lot.

The orange juice stayed untouched on the seat.

Another witness would add an agonizing detail.

Earlier that morning, a jogger near the tennis courts had seen a girl lying on the ground while a man knelt over her.

He did not understand what he was witnessing.

He assumed they were a couple.

He kept running.

Only later did the true meaning of the scene become clear.

Investigators now had several pieces of evidence.

They had the boys’ description of a man leaving the area.

They had the jogger’s observation.

And most importantly, evidence collected from Sarah’s clothing produced a full male DNA profile.

DNA matching that profile was also found beneath Sarah’s fingernails.

Whatever had happened in those final moments, Sarah had fought.

She had scratched her attacker hard enough to preserve a biological trace of him.

That piece of evidence would outlast almost everything else in the investigation.

The first mystery, however, remained how Sarah had gotten from the car to the secluded area.

There was no indication she had been dragged from the parking lot.

Early investigators considered the possibility that someone might have appealed to her helpful nature. Perhaps a stranger had asked her to look for something or assist with some minor problem.

It would have fit the Sarah her family knew.

Years later, after investigators finally identified a suspect and examined his earlier crimes, prosecutors would consider a more disturbing explanation.

Patrick Nicholas had a history of approaching women near vehicles, beginning with casual conversation and then using a knife to control them and move them toward secluded locations.

That pattern gave authorities reason to believe Sarah may have been forced to walk away from her car.

In December 1991, however, detectives did not yet know Nicholas’s name.

They had only the face described by Drew and Adam.

The boys worked with a police sketch artist.

They described a white man approximately six feet tall, with a medium build.

One feature stood out.

His facial skin appeared rough and uneven, almost as though he had acne scarring or some other visible texture.

The boys believed the resulting sketch was accurate.

Police released it throughout Federal Way.

Copies appeared in businesses and public places. Newspapers and television stations carried the image.

Tips flooded in.

Hundreds became thousands.

Sarah’s grandfather helped facilitate the donation of a computer system so the King County Sheriff’s Office could manage the volume of information.

More than 3,000 tips were eventually examined in the early investigation.

None produced the killer.

Federal Way lived with the drawing of an unknown man.

Parents changed routines.

Families became more cautious.

Sarah’s classmates continued with lives she should have been living beside them.

College applications arrived.

Prom came.

Graduation approached.

For Sarah’s friends, celebrations often carried guilt with them.

Shannon Grant, one of Sarah’s closest friends, had been among the last people to see her during the ordinary hours before the crime. Like others close to Sarah, she replayed small choices in her mind and wondered whether something as simple as checking the correct meeting time might have changed the morning.

There was no way to know.

On June 12, 1993, Sarah’s classmates graduated from Federal Way High School.

It would also have been Sarah’s eighteenth birthday.

That day, a memorial bench was unveiled in the school courtyard.

A close Yarborough family friend named Bill Fuller had helped lead the effort to create it.

The bench carried Sarah’s motto, carpe diem, and included images representing things she loved, including books and ballet shoes.

Her younger brother Andrew stood with Bill Fuller during the dedication.

Later, Laura attended the graduation ceremony.

She watched Sarah’s friends walk across the stage her daughter should have crossed.

In the years that followed, those young women remained part of Laura’s life. Some still turned to her when they faced major decisions, preserving a connection to the friend they had lost.

And Bill Fuller’s name remained associated with the family and Sarah’s memory.

At the time, no one could have imagined that his name would become relevant to the investigation in an entirely different way.

Another part of the story had begun eight years before Sarah’s death.

In June 1983, a twenty-one-year-old woman named Ann drove to a park along the Columbia River near Richland, Washington.

She was alone near her car when a nineteen-year-old man approached.

He introduced himself as Pat Nicholas.

At first, the exchange appeared harmless.

They made small talk. At one point, he told her he could not swim.

Then his behavior changed.

When Ann tried to leave, Nicholas threatened her with a knife and forced her away from the car toward the riverbank.

Ann remembered the one useful thing he had told her.

He could not swim.

She ran toward the water and jumped in.

She swam away while Nicholas remained on shore.

People near a dock helped her from the river and contacted police.

Authorities identified the attacker as Patrick Leon Nicholas.

He already had a history of serious offenses committed as a juvenile against women.

The pattern was striking.

He approached women near their vehicles.

He spoke to them first.

Then he produced a knife and tried to move them to more isolated places.

After the attack on Ann, Nicholas pleaded guilty to first-degree attempted assault.

The court sentenced him to ten years in prison.

Ann believed that meant he would remain incarcerated for a decade.

He did not.

After approximately three and a half years, Nicholas was released in 1987.

Records cited his behavior in custody and an assessment that he could be safely managed with treatment and parole supervision.

Ann was not aware that he had been released so early.

If Nicholas had served the entire ten-year sentence imposed in 1983, he would still have been incarcerated in December 1991.

Instead, he was free.

And for years after his release, his name never appeared among the thousands of tips in the Sarah Yarborough investigation.

The DNA recovered from Sarah’s case was eventually entered into CODIS, the national law-enforcement DNA database.

Detectives checked repeatedly.

There was no match.

The absence became harder to understand as the years passed.

They knew the attack had produced a complete male profile.

Yet the person who left that DNA seemed absent from the system.

By the early 2000s, investigators had exhausted thousands of leads without putting a name to the genetic evidence.

Then, in 2011, Detective Jim Allen contacted Colleen Fitzpatrick of Identifinders International.

Fitzpatrick was working at the edge of what would later become known as forensic genetic genealogy.

Consumer DNA databases were becoming popular among people researching ancestry. Fitzpatrick believed some of that genealogical information could also help investigators develop leads in crimes where ordinary DNA database searches had failed.

At the time, the idea was far outside conventional police practice.

Fitzpatrick offered to examine the Yarborough evidence.

She focused on the Y chromosome, which follows the paternal line.

The result did not identify the killer.

It identified his ancestry.

The Y chromosome connected to Sarah’s case matched men descended from a shared paternal ancestor named Robert Fuller, who had lived in Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1600s.

The finding was historically significant.

According to the source, Sarah’s case became the first cold case to generate investigative leads through consumer DNA databases.

But a seventeenth-century ancestor was not a suspect.

Robert Fuller had an enormous number of descendants.

The family tree branched across centuries.

Investigators had found a bloodline, not a man.

Then one surname immediately stood out.

Fuller.

Detectives knew a Fuller connected to Sarah.

Bill Fuller.

The family friend who had helped build her memorial bench.

Police asked Bill for DNA.

He cooperated without hesitation.

The result excluded him as Sarah’s killer.

But his Y chromosome matched the paternal line investigators had identified.

Bill and the unknown killer were distant paternal relatives descended from the same Fuller family.

The result was both extraordinary and frustrating.

Investigators could trace the killer’s ancestry back hundreds of years, yet they still could not identify the individual who had been standing behind Federal Way High School in 1991.

Other Fullers were investigated.

Nothing led to Sarah’s attacker.

The promising lead stalled.

Fitzpatrick kept working.

Then forensic genetic genealogy underwent a transformation.

In 2018, the identification of the Golden State Killer demonstrated to law enforcement agencies nationwide how genealogy databases could generate leads in cases that had resisted traditional investigation.

Databases grew.

Techniques improved.

Investigators returned to Sarah’s case.

In September 2019, Fitzpatrick’s team identified two brothers who fit the family line: Edward Nicholas and Patrick Nicholas.

Their surname was not Fuller.

That difference had helped conceal the connection.

Their grandfather had been born into the Fuller line but had been adopted and raised under another surname.

The DNA had preserved a relationship the family name no longer showed.

Edward Nicholas could quickly be checked.

His DNA was already in CODIS.

He was not a match.

That left his younger brother.

Patrick Leon Nicholas.

Despite his history, Patrick’s DNA was not in CODIS.

Investigators now had a genealogical lead, but they still needed direct biological evidence.

They could not arrest a man simply because his family tree fit.

So detectives followed him.

By 2019, Nicholas was fifty-five.

He lived alone on a property in Covington, Washington, in a building without working electricity. He worked at an auto-parts store and relied on public transportation.

Investigators also discovered that a bus route he regularly used passed Federal Way High School.

In 1991, he had been twenty-seven and lived only about six miles from the school.

None of that proved anything.

The DNA would.

On September 29, 2019, undercover detectives followed Nicholas to a laundromat near a strip mall in Kent.

He went inside.

At one point, he stepped outside to smoke.

He finished one cigarette, then another.

Afterward, he discarded the cigarette butts.

A paper napkin also ended up on the sidewalk.

Nicholas returned inside.

Detectives collected the abandoned items and sent them for testing.

The cigarette DNA matched the DNA preserved from Sarah Yarborough’s clothing.

After twenty-eight years, the unknown genetic profile had a name.

Police arrested Patrick Nicholas.

During an interview that lasted about ninety minutes, he did not confess.

Eventually he requested an attorney.

The questioning ended.

Investigators searched his home.

Among stacks of old newspapers and magazines, two discoveries attracted particular attention.

One was a newspaper from 1994 whose front page carried an article about the Sarah Yarborough case.

Nicholas had retained it for roughly twenty-five years.

The other was a photograph torn from a magazine showing a young woman in a cheerleading outfit.

Neither item created the DNA match.

The discarded cigarette had already done that.

But both would later become part of the prosecution’s presentation to the jury.

Nearly 4,000 tips had reached investigators during the decades since Sarah’s death.

Patrick Nicholas had not been named in any of them.

The man whose DNA matched the evidence had been living in the region, carrying a criminal history, while thousands of other names passed through the case file.

After the arrest, law enforcement contacted Ann in Oregon.

For decades, she had believed the ten-year sentence imposed after her 1983 attack had protected others for that period.

She had not known Nicholas served only three and a half years.

Now she learned the man from whom she had escaped by swimming into the Columbia River had been identified as Sarah’s killer.

She later said she had never considered that the man she escaped was a murderer.

For Laura Yarborough, the arrest brought a different kind of reckoning.

She had spent twenty-eight years wanting an answer.

Now she finally had one.

Detectives who had continued working the case told her that technology had finally caught up with the evidence Sarah had left behind.

But an arrest was not a conviction.

Nicholas did not admit killing Sarah.

The case moved toward trial.

Three and a half more years passed through motions, hearings and legal delays.

On April 17, 2023, more than thirty-one years after Sarah’s death, Patrick Nicholas went on trial at the Norm Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent.

He was fifty-nine.

Sarah’s mother, her brother Andrew, childhood friends and Drew Miller were among those who came to court.

Before the jury heard the case, the judge made a consequential evidentiary ruling.

Nicholas’s prior criminal history would not be presented to the jurors.

They would not hear about his juvenile offenses, his attack on Ann or another later offense.

The court determined that presenting those acts could unfairly prejudice the jury.

That meant prosecutors had to prove the Yarborough case from its own evidence.

Deputy prosecutors Celia Lee and Mary Barbosa centered their case on the DNA.

The defense, led by public defender David Montes, attacked the path that genetic genealogy had taken investigators down.

Montes questioned the reliability of the method and argued police, after decades without an arrest, had seized on an unconventional technique that pointed them toward the wrong man.

He also focused on the eyewitness description.

In 1991, Drew and Adam had described the man leaving the bushes as having rough, uneven-looking facial skin.

The defense argued that Nicholas did not have the acne scarring the boys appeared to have described.

Prosecutors offered another possibility.

The DNA beneath Sarah’s fingernails showed she had scratched her attacker.

The irregular appearance Drew noticed, prosecutors argued, could have been fresh scratches rather than acne scars.

The same detail that once seemed like a weakness in the eyewitness description could be interpreted as evidence of Sarah’s resistance.

Then jurors heard the laboratory results.

DNA associated with Sarah’s sweatshirt and drill-team jacket matched Nicholas on thirteen of thirteen tested genetic markers.

According to the testimony summarized in the source, the probability of the profile belonging to someone else was calculated at one in 120 quadrillion.

The DNA from beneath Sarah’s fingernails was calculated as being 590 billion times more likely to have come from Nicholas than from an unrelated individual.

The jurors also saw physical evidence that had remained preserved for more than thirty years.

Sarah’s drill-team clothing was brought into court.

For the people who had known her, those pieces were not abstract exhibits.

They were the clothes she had put on while rushing from home on December 14, 1991.

They were tangible pieces of a morning that had never ended for her family.

The trial lasted nine days.

Then the jury deliberated for a day and a half.

When the jurors returned, Sarah’s family and friends listened as the verdicts were read.

On the charge of premeditated first-degree murder, the jury found Nicholas not guilty.

For a moment, the result was devastating.

Premeditation had not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

But the foreperson continued.

Nicholas was found guilty of first-degree murder committed during the commission of an attempted assault.

He was also found guilty of second-degree murder committed while committing indecent liberties.

The jury additionally found that Sarah’s killing was sexually motivated.

After more than three decades, a jury had formally held Patrick Nicholas responsible.

Drew Miller, now an adult who had carried the memory of that Saturday morning since he was thirteen, looked toward the jury.

One juror gave him a small nod.

For a witness who had spent most of his life knowing the face he saw had never produced an arrest, the gesture mattered.

Two weeks later, on May 25, 2023, the courtroom filled again for sentencing.

This time, the focus was not genealogy or laboratory statistics.

It was Sarah.

Laura spoke about the daughter who planted flowers in spring, helped her brothers with their homework, loved museums and ballet, and wanted a future far beyond Federal Way.

She described the damage that followed Sarah’s death.

There were years Laura and her husband could barely remember clearly.

Her brother Andrew also spoke.

He had been eleven when Sarah died.

As an adult, he still remembered the sound of his father’s voice when he learned his sister was gone and the sound of his parents grieving behind closed doors.

Sarah’s friends described the milestones that had always included an absence.

Graduations.

Weddings.

Children.

Moments when happiness arrived beside the knowledge that Sarah had been denied the chance to experience any of them.

Then Ann stood to speak.

Her prior encounter with Nicholas had been excluded from the trial, but sentencing gave her an opportunity to address the court.

Decades had passed since she escaped him by running into the Columbia River.

According to the account, Nicholas appeared to recognize her when she approached the podium.

Ann described the 1983 attack and asked the court not to repeat the institutional failure that had allowed Nicholas back into society years earlier.

Judge Josephine Wiggs sentenced Patrick Leon Nicholas to 548 months in prison—45 years and eight months.

The exceptional sentence exceeded the standard range and was supported by the jury’s finding concerning the sexual motivation of the crime.

For Sarah’s family, the sentence closed one part of the case.

It could not return the thirty-two years already gone.

It also could not erase the painful questions surrounding the systems that had repeatedly failed to connect Nicholas to DNA databases.

His earliest juvenile offenses occurred before CODIS existed.

A later case did not result in his DNA entering the database.

And by 2005, the DNA profile of his brother Edward was already stored in CODIS.

According to prosecutors, a familial DNA search might have revealed the relationship years earlier, but Washington did not permit that form of searching.

Patrick Nicholas remained unidentified until genetic genealogy took detectives beyond the limits of a direct database match.

The legal story continued after his 2023 conviction.

In 2025, the Washington Court of Appeals considered challenges including the admission of DNA evidence and the collection of Nicholas’s DNA from the discarded cigarette.

The court rejected those challenges and left the conviction intact.

It did, however, order resentencing because of a technical issue involving the exceptional sentence.

Nicholas remained incarcerated.

The scientific legacy of Sarah’s case extended far beyond one courtroom.

When Jim Allen approached Colleen Fitzpatrick in 2011, the idea of using consumer genealogy information to help develop suspects in an unsolved murder was still experimental.

The first result seemed almost absurdly distant from the crime.

A man named Robert Fuller who had lived in Massachusetts in the 1600s.

A paternal line that crossed hundreds of years.

Then a living family friend named Bill Fuller, whose DNA proved he was innocent while simultaneously confirming that the unknown killer belonged somewhere in the same extended lineage.

Then an adoption that changed a surname.

Then two brothers.

Then one exclusion.

Then Patrick Nicholas.

Then two cigarette butts on a sidewalk.

The path from Sarah’s fingernails in 1991 to that laundromat in 2019 was almost unimaginable when the case began.

Yet the biological evidence Sarah preserved while fighting for her life remained the same.

Technology changed around it.

For Drew Miller, solving the case did not simply erase the image he had carried since childhood.

At thirteen, he had walked across a frozen school campus expecting to spend the day skateboarding.

Instead, he encountered Sarah and saw the man who had just left her.

For decades, he lived with that morning.

After the case was resolved, Drew said that knowing Nicholas was in prison mattered, but getting to know Sarah’s family and friends mattered even more to his healing.

That distinction captures what an arrest could never provide by itself.

Justice could identify the man.

A sentence could remove him from society.

DNA could finally answer the question detectives had carried since 1991.

None of those things could give Sarah back the years she never lived.

Laura chose not to give Patrick Nicholas more emotional space than necessary.

She preferred to think about her daughter.

About the flowers.

The dancing.

The books.

The teenager who helped her brothers.

The girl with the red hair who wanted to leave Washington for college and see more of the world.

The sixteen-year-old who woke on December 14, 1991, saw the clock and believed she had lost precious time.

She hurried because she thought she was late.

She was early.

Nearly an hour early.

That small mistake left her alone in a school parking lot with a container of orange juice on the passenger seat and a future that, until that morning, had seemed impossibly large.

More than thirty years later, the people who loved her finally learned the name of the man who took that future.

Yet the words engraved into Sarah’s memorial had never been about him.

They were about her.

Carpe diem.

Seize the day.

For decades, her family, friends, witnesses, detectives and scientists kept returning to a case that refused to give them an easy answer.

And in the end, the clue that endured longest was the one Sarah herself had fought to leave behind.

Her attacker escaped the school grounds.

He escaped thousands of tips.

He escaped direct DNA databases.

He escaped detection for twenty-eight years.

But he did not escape what Sarah carried beneath her fingernails.

And that was enough.