Washington 1991 Cold Case Solved — Arrest Shocks Community

The suspect was arrested in 2019 after genetic genealogy led police to him. >> A 16-year-old girl is driving her blue Honda Civic to school in Federal Way, Washington. She has her drill team uniform on. She was in such a hurry getting out the door that she forgot to take the curlers out of her hair. She left them in.

 She figured she’d take them out when she got there. She parked in the back lot 300 ft from the school. She got out of the car. She walked toward the gym where the team was supposed to meet. She never made it. Her teammates arrived at 9:00. They saw her car. They got on the bus. They looked around. No, Sarah. The bus left for the competition.

 Her car sat in that parking lot with a container of orange juice still upright on the front seat. Nobody had touched it. Nobody had struggled. It just sat there. Two 13-year-old boys taking a shortcut through campus on their way to skateboard saw a man walking out of the bushes on a hillside behind the school. They thought nothing of it until they went into the bushes and found what he had left there.

 Hot curlers still in her hair, drill team uniform, 300 ft from her car. She had been strangled with her own nylons. Whoever did that left behind the one piece of evidence that should have ended this case in weeks. It took 28 years. Welcome to Cold Case Unlocked. If you’re new here, this channel covers cold cases that took decades to solve.

 Drop a comment and tell us where you’re watching from. And if you stay until the end of this one, you’ll find out why it took 28 years for that lead to land in a courtroom. Her name was Sarah Yarro, born June 4th, 1975. 16 years old, strawberry blonde hair, a smile her friends said she gave to everyone.

 Not selectively, not to people she already knew, to everyone she passed. An honor student, a junior at Federal Way High School. She had been dancing since she was small. Ballet first, then the school’s drill team, which she just joined that year. Her friends said she was excited about the competition. The night before she’d been at a basketball game with girlfriends, happy, looking forward to the morning.

Her parents, Tom and Laura, both worked at Wirehouser. The family were members of Bible Baptist Church in Auburn, where Sarah was active in the youth group. She had two younger brothers, John Jr. and Andrew, who was 11 years old in December 1991. She had traveled with a campfire affiliated performance group called the Safety Kids, a group that toured the world giving anti-drug, anti-alcohol dance performances.

The previous summer, she had gone with them to New Zealand. She was saving for college. She had plans. Less than a week before she died, Laura asked if she could take her photo. Her great grandmother wanted a picture of Sarah in her drill team uniform. Sarah said, “Okay.” She stood there in her blue skirt and sweater and let her mother take the photo.

 That photograph is the last image anyone has of her alive. December 14th, 1991. The drill team had a competition that morning at Wanita High School in Kirkland. Members were supposed to meet at Federal Way High School between 9:00 and 9:30 to board a bus. Sarah arrived early. The team wasn’t there yet. She parked in the back lot, got out, and started walking toward the gym.

 The campus was quiet, cold. The mud puddles had frozen overnight. She was alone. 13-year-old Drew Miller lived down the street from the school. He and a friend had slept over at his house, woke up, watched cartoons, ate cereal, and headed out to skateboard. They took a shortcut through the school grounds.

 As they crossed campus, they saw a man walking ahead of them, out of the bushes on the hillside, unhurried, keeping to himself. They didn’t think much of it. They went on toward the bushes to explore. What they found there, Drew Miller said more than 30 years later, had never once faded from his memory. Not one detail.

They found Sarah still in her uniform, hot curlers still in her hair, strangled with her own nylons, which had been tied in a liature around her neck. Her jacket and undergarments had been removed and placed in a pile near her body. They ran back home and informed their parents, and they immediately called 911.

Officers of the Federal Way PD discovered something more disturbing. Sarah had been sexually assaulted. Seaman was recovered from her underwear. A detective named Scott Strathy was one of the first officers on scene. He said later with the plain directness of a man who had seen a lot of things, just the innocent nature of this young woman in her school drill team uniform with her hot curlers still in her hair.

 This was just pure unadulterated evil. There was no sign of struggle near the car. The orange juice was still upright on the front seat. She hadn’t even made it inside the building. A jogger who had passed through the area that morning told police he had seen a man kneeling over a girl on the hillside. He thought they were a couple. He jogged on.

 He gave investigators a description. The two boys gave their own. Composite sketches were drawn from both accounts. A white male, mid to late 20s, average build. The sketches went public immediately. DNA was pulled from the seaman on Sarah’s clothing. A complete male profile was developed. It went into the Washington criminal database, then to Cotus, the FBI’s national database, then Interpol.

 Between two and 300 men were swabbed over the following years. Not one matched. The man who left his DNA on that hillside in Federal Way had no record anywhere in the country that any database could find. The detectives told Laura Yarro something earlier on, something she held on to for the next three decades. They told her that eventually technology would solve this case. She trusted them.

 They turned out to be right, she said. In the meantime, the community built something. In the years after Sarah’s murder, her classmates, family, and friends raised funds, and erected a memorial bench on the Federal Way High School campus. Cast in bronze beside the bench were some of Sarah’s things, her ballet slippers, her books, a replica of her dog, Gibby.

 The bench was engraved with two words she had lived by. Carpey DM. The case was featured on America’s Most Wanted in 2000. Tips came in, none matched. Investigators re-examined the DNA profile every time technology advanced, running it through expanding databases. Every time the same result, no match. The man who had been on that hillside had no record, no conviction, no reason to be in any system.

 He was invisible to every tool that existed to find him. By 2011, 20 years had passed. That’s when Colleen Fitzpatrick, a forensic genealogologist, began working the case. This was the first time anyone in law enforcement had ever tried to use direct to consumer genetic genealogy databases to generate investigative leads in a criminal cold case.

 There was no template, no precedent, no manual. Fitzpatrick uploaded the killer’s DNA profile to an ancestry database in search for partial matches. Not whoever committed this crime, but his relatives. People who shared fragments of his genetic material because they were his cousins, his second cousins, his third cousins, people who had signed up to trace their own roots without the faintest idea their family tree was about to become part of a murder investigation.

 The matches led backward through generations to a man named Robert Fuller who had lived in Salem, Massachusetts in the 1630s. A relative of the Fuller family who came to America on the Mayflower. Sarah Yarro’s killer was a descendant of Mayflower passengers. The family tree spread out in every direction from there. Investigators had a surname.

 They had a bloodline. What they didn’t have yet was a name. and suspicion briefly fell on the wrong branch. A longtime Yarborough family friend whose daughter had been Sarah’s classmate was considered seriously before being eliminated. For eight more years, the tree was being refined. In September 2019, genealogologists working with the King County Sheriff’s Department made a breakthrough.

 Two brothers emerged from the Fuller line as the strongest candidates, both of whom had lived near Federal Way High School at the time of the murder. One was immediately ruled out. He had a prior sex offense conviction which meant his DNA was already in cowus. It had been run against the Sarah Yarro profile before and it didn’t match.

 The brother was clean. The other brother was not in any database. He had five known sexual assaults on his record, none of which had required him to submit DNA under the laws in effect at the time. He was invisible to the criminal database. He had been invisible for 28 years. He was 55 years old in 2019, living in Covington, Washington.

 In December 1991, he was 27, riding a bus route that passed directly by Federal Way High School. He had already been to prison once by then for attempted assault in Benton County. He had approached a woman in her car, threatened her with a knife, forced her to remove her clothing, and marched her toward a river before she jumped in and swam away.

 He was convicted. He served time. He was released. He came back to the King County area. He committed at least four more sexual assaults that investigators knew of. None of them put his DNA in the system. He built a quiet life in Covington. He had no profile anywhere. He was just a man. His name was Patrick Leon Nicholas.

 Detectives began surveillance. Over a weekend in late September 2019, they watched him, waited, and collected what he discarded. Two cigarette butts, a napkin. He dropped them without thinking about it, the way anyone does. The Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory ran the comparison against the 1991 Seaman profile.

 On October 2nd, 2019, the result came back. 1 in 120 quadrillion. The DNA on Sarah Yarro’s underwear belonged to Patrick Leon Nicholas. That afternoon, detectives arrested him at a bar in Kent. He was asked why he thought he was there. He said he had no clue. When they told him they were investigating the murder of a girl named Sarah Yarro, he asked what year that was. The detective noted that question.

It sent up a flag. He is not denying he wants to confirm the date he has carried for 28 years. When Drew Miller, the 13-year-old boy who had seen the man walk out of the bushes that morning and spent 28 years carrying that image, was shown Nicholas’s face. He said one thing, “The same guy, just older. Evil eyes.” Those evil eyes stayed the same.

The trial opened April 17th, 2023, 32 years after the morning had happened. The case finally went before a jury at the Norm Malayang Regional Justice Center in Kent. Prosecutors laid out the DNA evidence piece by piece. Sarah’s sweatshirt, her skirt, her socks, her hair curlers, the seaman profile from 1991, and the DNA pulled from two discarded cigarettes and a napkin in 2019.

One in 120 quadrillion. The same man. Nicholas’s defense attorney argued the genealogy technology was unproven and that Nicholas didn’t match the description given by the two teenage eyewitnesses. Specifically, that he didn’t have the acne or acne scarring they had described. He told the jury that the detectives had needed an answer more than they had needed the right answer.

 2 and 1/2 weeks of testimony. On May 10th, 2023, the jury came back after a day and a half of deliberation and declared Patrick Leah Nicholas guilty. Guilty for firstdegree felony murder with sexual motivation. Sarah’s friend Christy Gutierrez was in the courthouse. She went to her car afterward and sat there and cried.

 “Just balling,” she said. “Finally.” Andrew Yarbro, the 11-year-old boy who had heard his parents crying through the walls the night they learned his sister was gone, stood up at sentencing and spoke. “I next recall the pain in my father’s voice over the phone telling me that Sarah was dead.” He said, “I recall the sounds of my parents crying through the walls at night as I laid in bed.

Over the life of this convicted monster, he does not possess the ability to experience remorse or feel emotions the way normal people do. He does not belong in free society with the rest of the people in this room. Laura Yarborough said what she had been carrying since 1991. We lived the last 30 years wondering when and if someone was going to be arrested.

 She said, “Knowing that was kind of a Damocles sword hanging over your head and you never know when it’s going to fall. She also said this about Patrick Nicholas and the crimes he committed before Federal Way. If he had still been in prison, he wouldn’t have been around to kill our daughter. Judge Josephine Wig sentenced Patrick Leon Nicholas to 548 months. 45 years and 8 months.

 She called it an outrageous violation of a child culminating in murder, a basis for an exceptional sentence. He was 59 years old. He will be over a hundred before he is eligible for release. Nicholas said nothing. Sarah Yarro, born June 4th, 1975, 16 years old, strawberry blonde, an honor student, a dancer.

 She had been to New Zealand. She was saving for college. She said okay when her mother asked to take her photo because her great grandmother wanted a picture of her in her drill team uniform. She left the house in a hurry that Saturday morning. Cold outside, mud puddles frozen over. She forgot to take the curlers out. She figured she’d do it when she got there.

The orange juice she’d brought was still sitting upright on the front seat when detectives arrived. No sign of struggle. She never made it to the gym. On the Federal Way High School campus, there is a memorial bench, bronze ballet slippers, bronze books, a bronze replica of Gibby, her dog, two words engraved in the stone, carp, she lived that way.

 Every day she had, she lived that way. If you have a daughter or a son who does anything alone in the early morning, drives to practice, walks to school, parks in a lot before anyone else arrives, talk to them about staying visible. Park close. Text when you get there. One message. It takes 10 seconds. Laura Yarro took a photo of Sarah less than a week before she died because her great grandmother wanted to see her in the uniform.

 That photo exists because a mother paid attention to ordinary moments. Pay attention to yours. If this case stayed with you, tell us in the comments which moment hit hardest. Hit like, subscribe, and we’ll see you in the next