Washington 1991 Cold Case Solved — "I Never Got to See Her Become a Mother"

When I think about this poor child, this poor child, what she experienced fighting for her life. She still had hot rollers in her hair when she arrived. She had rushed out of the house that Saturday morning, grabbed her father's car keys, and driven to school in her drill team uniform because she thought she was late. She was 16 years old and she did not want to let her team down. She pulled into the Federal Way High School parking lot a little after eight in the morning, stepped out of the car, and looked around. Nobody was there yet. The campus was quiet. She was not late. She was an hour early. That hour was the window he needed. She was found later that morning in an area of overgrown brush on the edge of the campus about 300 feet from her own car. Her nylons had been wrapped around her neck. She was still wearing her drill team uniform. The man who did it had been convicted of attempted rape eight years earlier. He should still have been in prison. He wasn't, and so he was free to take a bus past Federal Way High School that December morning, and to recognize what a 16-year-old girl standing alone on an empty campus actually represented to someone who had been hunting women his entire adult life. He saw opportunity. He walked toward it, and 31 years passed before anyone made him answer for it. This is the story of Sarah Yarborough. Before we go any further, drop a comment right now and tell me where you're watching from. If you already knew Sarah's name before today, tell me that too. Hit subscribe, because this case has details that are going to stay with you, and I want you here when the next one comes. Now, Federal Way, Washington, December 14, 1991. Federal Way sits about 20 miles south of Seattle, a city built from suburbs, sprawl, and working neighborhoods. The kind of place where a school's drill team competing on a Saturday morning is simply what weekends look like. Federal Way High School was the center of the community in the way that high schools tend to be in places like that. Everybody's kid, everybody's Friday night game, everybody's story. Sarah Yarborough was 16 and a junior, honor student, drill team member, the kind of teenager whose ambition and work ethic showed up in everything she touched. Her mother, Laura, would later say that Sarah never got to attend college, fall in love, marry, or have children. She said it plainly, the way you say something after you have had 30 years to understand exactly what was taken. On the morning of December 14, 1991, Sarah raced out of her house in her drill team uniform, hot rollers still wound through her hair, and drove to school for a competition at another campus. She thought she was running behind. She was not. The team was not scheduled to gather for another hour, and so when Sarah pulled into the parking lot and found it largely empty, she had no reason to think anything was wrong. She was just early. She stepped out of the car and waited. She was alone on a quiet Saturday campus. The team would arrive eventually. There was no reason to worry. He was already there, or close enough. Shortly after nine in the morning, two boys, 12 and 13 years old, were cutting through the school campus on their way to go skateboarding. They were taking a shortcut they probably took all the time, the kind of route kids develop through sheer repetition. As they crossed the grounds, they saw a man pop up from the embankment on the edge of the campus and walk away quickly. Something about it registered. Something about the way he moved said not to follow him. They went to the bushes instead. They found Sarah Yarborough there, partially undressed, motionless in the overgrown brush about 300 feet from her own car. They ran to one of their homes and told the boy's parents, who called 911. A jogger who had passed through the area earlier told investigators he had also seen something, a girl lying motionless on the ground and a man kneeling over her. He assumed they were a couple making out. He kept jogging. He didn't stop. He didn't call anyone. He just went on with his Saturday morning while Sarah Yarborough lay in those bushes. The medical examiner's findings confirmed what investigators could see from the scene. Sarah had been beaten. Her nylons had been pulled from her body and used to strangle her. Cause of death, a combination of ligature and manual strangulation. Investigators recovered a full male DNA profile from semen found on her clothing. No sexual intercourse had occurred, but this was not a crime of impulse or passion. Investigators believed based on everything at the scene and everything that would later emerge about the suspect's history that Patrick Nicholas had gone to that campus that morning specifically to do what he did. He had premeditated it. He had found his target and then he had walked away from the embankment, past those two boys and disappeared into a Saturday morning in suburban Washington while everyone who knew Sarah Yarborough was still on their way to school. Witnesses who had been in or near the school campus that morning gave police a description of the man they had seen. White male, approximately six feet tall, long blonde hair. Sketches were drawn. The DNA profile from the crime scene was run through CODIS. The national database, no match. The King County Sheriff's detectives who inherited Sarah's case over the following decades worked at the way good detectives work, an unsolved case that will not let them go. More than 4,000 leads were investigated over 31 years. Persons of interest were questioned and cleared. Evidence was re-examined as technology improved. In 2011, forensic scientists were able to determine physical attributes and general ancestry from the DNA profile, building a picture of the suspect from his own genetic material, even without a name to attach to it. But the name remained out of reach. The man they were looking for had never been convicted of a crime that would have required his DNA to be entered into any searchable database. Every advancement in forensic technology got them closer to a face and no closer to a name. Laura Yarborough described what 30 years of that felt like. She said, We lived the last 30 years wondering when and if someone was going to be arrested and knowing that was kind of a Damocles sword hanging over your head and you never know when it's going to fall. She said that even when she gave up at times, the detectives never did. That difference mattered to her. She held on to it. Here's the thing about Patrick Leon Nicholas that makes this case something more than a cold case finally solved. It makes it something the criminal justice system needs to sit with for a very long time. In 1983, eight years before he killed Sarah Yarborough, Nicholas approached a young woman named Ann Crony in Benton County, Washington. She was near her car. He reached through the open driver's window and put a knife to her throat. He told her to take off her clothes. Then he walked her toward a river. Ann Crony jumped into that river and swam. She later said she swam harder than she had ever swam in her life. She survived. Nicholas was convicted of first degree attempted rape. Based on his sentence, he should have remained in prison until 1993. He was released early. He was on parole when he killed Sarah Yarborough in December 1991. Let that sit for a moment. He should still have been in prison. He would still have been in prison and Sarah Yarborough would have driven to her drill team competition, come home that evening and continued the life she was in the middle of living. Ann Crony stood in that King County courtroom more than 40 years after the river and said, the system failed me. It failed Sarah. She was right. Nicholas went on to commit additional sexual assaults after Sarah's murder, including a child molestation arrest in 1993, two years after Sarah's death. His pattern across multiple attacks was the same. Find a woman alone near her car, approach with a knife, force her to walk to an isolated area. He had been doing this for years before Sarah. The system knew. The system let him out anyway. If you're watching this and you haven't subscribed yet, right now is the moment to do it because what comes next, how they finally found him and what the family said when they did is the part that makes people stay in the comments for hours. Tap on the subscribe button now and like this video. Uh, investigators discovered that around the time of Sarah's murder, Nicholas had regularly taken a bus route that passed federal way high school. He was not a student. He had no connection to the school, but he rode that route. He passed that campus. He learned it. And on December 14th, 1991, he was there on a Saturday morning when a 16 year old girl arrived an hour earlier than she was supposed to. In 2019, 28 years after the murder, King County detectives arranged for forensic genetic genealogy analysis on the preserved DNA. Genealogists built family trees from partial matches in public ancestry databases, narrowing the suspect pool branch by branch. The analysis identified two brothers. The older brother's DNA was already in CODIS from an unrelated matter. He was eliminated immediately. That left the younger brother, Patrick Leon Nicholas, Covington, Washington, 55 years old. He had lived six miles from federal way high school. Detectives ran surveillance. They watched Nicholas go about his ordinary life, his job, his errands, his days. They waited over several days. They collected items. He had discarded cigarettes, a napkin, the DNA from those discarded items was sent to the Washington state patrol crime lab. On October 2nd, 2019, the lab called the DNA from the cigarettes matched the DNA from Sarah Yarborough's clothing in 1991 exact match. That same day, detectives found Nicholas at a business in Kent, Washington and arrested him. Bail was set at $5 million. The trial of Patrick Leon Nicholas began in the spring of 2023 in King County. For more than two and a half weeks, the jury heard the evidence assembled across 31 years of investigation. They heard what was found at the scene. They heard about the DNA. They heard about his prior convictions and the pattern of predatory behavior that prosecutors argued defined his entire adult life. Senior deputy prosecutor, Mary Barbosa told the jury, Mr. Nicholas is a prolific sex offender. He killed Sarah Yarborough while he was on parole from attempted rape of another woman. No one would ever know exactly how Nicholas forced Sarah away from her car, her school and her arriving teammates. But Barbosa laid out his method in four previous attacks, knife to the throat, alone near a car, forced to walk to a secluded area. She argued that was exactly what happened to Sarah. On May 10th, 2023, the jury found Patrick Leon Nicholas guilty of murder in the first degree and murder in the second degree, both with sexual motivation. He sat at the defense table and did not react. The sentencing took place on May 25th, 2023. Before Judge Wiggs handed down a sentence, the people who had lived inside this case for 31 years stood up and spoke. Sarah's younger brother, Andrew Yarborough, had been 11 years old when his sister was killed. He stood in that courtroom and said, I next recall the pain in my father's voice over the phone telling me that Sarah was dead. I recall the He was 11. He lay in the dark listening to his parents fall apart and he had no language for what was happening and nowhere to put it. That moment did not end when morning came. It followed him for 31 years. Laura Yarborough stood before the court and addressed what had been taken. She said, I never got to take Sarah shopping for a prom dress or a wedding gown or to see her fall in When we lost her, our family was irrevocably changed. Then she said something about Nicholas that carries more weight than any legal verdict. He is incapable of remorse and empathy. He should spend the rest of his life in prison and never be paroled. And then she said this. After the sentencing, standing outside the courthouse surrounded by news cameras, I try to give him as I don't think he deserves my time and attention. 31 years of waiting. And when the answer finally came, she chose to give him nothing, not her grief, not her rage, not the space in her thoughts. He had already stolen enough of that choice. Quiet, deliberate, dignified might be the most powerful thing anyone said in this entire case. Then a detective named hatch stood up. He had worked this case. He was almost 70 years old. He looked at Lori Yarborough and he said, Lori Yarborough, I apologize. It took so long. Then he talked about a fellow detective named Jim Doyon, who had also worked the case and had since passed away. He said that when his own time came and he met detective Dorian at the gate, Dorian would ask him, is it solved? And he was going to tell him, yes, Jim. There was a single whoop from somewhere in the courtroom when the sentence was read. Judge Wiggs sentenced Patrick Leon Nicholas to 548 months, nearly 46 years. Nicholas did not react. He did not address the court. He intends to appeal. He was 59 years old. He will almost certainly die in prison. Federal Way High School stands in the same place it has always stood, a school where kids go every day to study and compete and argue in hallways and figure out who they are. Sarah Yarborough walked through those doors as a student. She drove to that parking lot one Saturday morning thinking she was late and walked into the worst luck a person can have being in the right place for the wrong kind of person to find her. But the word luck is doing too much work there because Patrick Nicholas did not get 31 years of freedom through luck either. He got it because a system released him early from a sentence he had earned, because he had a pattern of targeting women in isolated situations that somehow never got him into a database before it was too late, and because the forensic technology capable of reaching him through his family tree did not exist until the year of his arrest. None of those gaps were invisible. All of them were exploitable. And Nicholas, whether consciously or not, had spent his entire criminal life exploiting exactly those gaps. The moment a woman is alone, the moment a car is parked in a quiet lot, the moment a campus is empty on a Saturday morning and a girl in a drill team uniform with hot rollers in her hair is standing there by herself not yet understanding that no one is coming to meet her for another hour, Ann Croney was right. The system failed Sarah. It had already failed her before December 14, 1991. The failure happened years earlier in a release decision that nobody reviewed with enough care that handed a convicted rapist his freedom ahead of schedule and handed him back to the world where Sarah Yarborough was waiting without knowing it. After the sentencing, Laura Yarborough told reporters that her goal throughout the trial, the entire thing, every week of testimony, every day of sitting in that room, was to make sure that no other women were injured or killed by Nicholas. Not revenge, not closure, just the practical forward-looking goal of stopping something from happening to someone else's daughter. We'll always pine for Sarah, she said. We still miss her. She has been saying that for 31 years. The missing does not get smaller. The absence does not get easier to navigate. You learn to move which dates on the calendar to brace for. You do not stop missing them. You just get more practiced at carrying it. Sarah Yarborough was 16. She was an honor student and a drill team member. She rushed out of her house one Saturday morning with hot rollers in her hair because she loved what she was part of and she did not want to let anyone down. She drove her father's car to school. She arrived early and walked into a quiet parking lot and stood there waiting. She was 300 feet from safety and she never made it. Drop a comment below and tell me what part of this hit you the hardest. Andrew's words about lying in bed listening to his parents cry, Laura choosing to give Nicholas no space in her head, Detective Hatch and his promise to Detective Doyon and Crony in that river, the hot rollers. Tell me because the people in cases like this one deserve to have their stories felt, not just watched. And if you're not subscribed now, there are more stories like Sarah's waiting. We'll be here. See you in the next one.