On the morning of December 14th, 1991, a 16-year-old girl with bright red hair rushed out of her front door. She was still wearing her drill team uniform. Her hair was still wrapped in curlers. She didn’t stop to fix them. She didn’t stop to check the time. She thought she was late.
And that one small mistake, that one moment of panic over nothing put her exactly where a predator needed her to be. She wasn’t late, she was early, almost an hour early. And in that empty parking lot on that freezing cold Saturday morning, she was completely alone. But here’s what she didn’t know. She wasn’t the only one there. Someone was already waiting. And by the time the rest of her team arrived, Sarah Yarborough would be gone.
This story has twists that most people have never heard before. And what happened next took over 30 years to unravel. To understand what was taken that morning, you first need to understand who Sarah Yarborough really was. Because she wasn’t just a name in a case file. She wasn’t just a headline. She was someone’s daughter, someone’s big sister, someone’s best friend, and every single person who knew her said the same thing. Sarah made the people around her better.
Sarah Louise Yarborough was born on June 12th, 1975 in Portland, Oregon. Her family moved to Federal Way, Washington when she was 8 years old. By the time she reached high school, she had become the kind of person that everyone noticed. Not because she demanded attention, but because she gave it. She had this bright red hair that you couldn’t miss, and a smile that her mother said lit up every room she walked into.
She was an honors student at Federal Way High School. She loved math and science. She loved art. She loved to read. She wasn’t the type of girl who was good at just one thing. She was good at everything she tried. And she tried everything. Sarah was a member of her school’s drill team. She was active in her church youth group at Bible Baptist Church. She danced with a group called the Safety Kids, a performance team that traveled around encouraging young people to stay away from harmful choices when she was just 15 years old.
That group took her all the way to New Zealand to perform. 15 years old and she had already seen more of the world than most adults. And she wanted to see more. She told her mother she didn’t want to go to a state college. She wanted to go somewhere far away, somewhere she had never been. She wanted to explore. She hadn’t fully decided what she wanted to do with her life yet, but she had two ideas. Either she wanted to be a museum curator or an engineer like her father. Her mother always said she was secretly rooting for the museum curator.
But more than any of that, more than the grades, the dancing, the traveling, the thing that everyone remembered most about Sarah was how kind she was. She helped her two younger brothers with their homework. She was always the first one to show up when someone needed something. She didn’t wait to be asked. She just helped. Her mother, Laura, described her as the delight of her life. She said Sarah was the kind of person who built bridges and brought people together, but in her own quiet way. She didn’t need to be the loudest voice in the room. She just needed to be there.
And khi she was there, everything felt right. Sarah had a motto, two words that she lived by. “Carpe Diem, seize the day.” Those two words meant everything to her. They weren’t just something she said. They were something she believed in. Every single day, Sarah Yarborough tried to squeeze every drop of life out of every moment she had. She didn’t waste time. She didn’t hold back. She seized the day every day. And that is what makes what happened to her so unbearable. Because on December 14th, 1991, someone stole all of her days. Every single one of them.
It was Friday, December 13th, 1991. The Yarborough family was getting ready to leave town. Sarah’s younger brother had a soccer game in Ocean Shores about 2 hours away from their home in Federal Way. The whole family was going. Everyone except Sarah. She had plans that weekend, important plans. Her drill team had a competition on Saturday morning, and she had other things going on, too. Her entire weekend was mapped out. She asked her parents if she could stay home by herself while they were gone.
Her parents were not comfortable with this idea. Laura Yarborough was reluctant to leave her 16-year-old daughter home alone for the weekend. But Sarah pushed back. She didn’t want to miss her competition. She didn’t want to miss her plans, and eventually her parents agreed under one condition. A friend had to come over and stay with her. Sarah agreed. That Friday night, Sarah and a group of friends went to a basketball game. It was a normal night, a fun night. Afterward, Sarah and the friend who was going to sleep over stopped to get fast food and snacks on the way home.
They were 16. They were carefree. They grabbed their junk food, went back to Sarah’s house, and settled in for the night. There was nothing unusual about any of it. Nothing that felt wrong, nothing that made anyone nervous. It was just two teenage girls laughing, eating, doing what teenage girls do on a Friday night. There was absolutely nothing, nothing at all that would make any of them think that by the next morning, everything would change.
Saturday morning came, December 14th. Sarah woke up and immediately panicked. She looked at the clock and thought she was late. Her drill team was supposed to meet at Federal Way High School that morning to board a bus to Juanita High School in Kirkland for a competition. Sarah jumped out of bed. She threw on her drill team uniform. She didn’t take the curlers out of her hair. She didn’t have time. She said a quick goodbye to her friend and ran out the door. She drove to the school.
Her father’s car pulled into the back parking lot of Federal Way High School at around 8:00 AM. She parked and then she waited because here’s the thing: Sarah was wrong about the time. The drill team didn’t need to be there until 9:00 AM. She was almost an hour early. There was no one else from the team there yet. The parking lot was mostly empty. The school was quiet. It was a Saturday morning in December, and the temperature was freezing cold. Ice had formed in the puddles overnight. The world was still and silent.
Sarah sat in the car with a large container of orange juice she had made that morning, resting on the passenger seat. She was just waiting. A 16-year-old girl in her drill team uniform, curlers still in her red hair, sitting alone in an empty parking lot on the coldest morning of the year. And somewhere nearby, someone was watching. What happened next would take 32 years, a revolution in science, and a trail of DNA that stretched all the way back to the 1600s to finally uncover. Because the person who was watching Sarah that morning had done this before.
While Sarah Yarborough sat alone in that parking lot, two boys were waking up just a few blocks away, and they had no idea that in less than an hour they would see something that would follow them for the rest of their lives. 13-year-old Drew Miller had a friend named Adam staying over at his house. The two boys had spent Friday night doing what 13-year-olds do. They stayed up late. They talked. They fell asleep whenever they fell asleep. And khi Saturday morning came, they did what every kid in America did on a Saturday morning in 1991.
They parked themselves in front of the television. They watched cartoons. They ate cereal. The world outside was freezing cold, but inside it was warm and easy, and nothing mattered except what was on the screen. It was the kind of morning you don’t think twice about. The kind you forget by Monday. But Drew Miller would never forget this one. After a while, the boys decided to head out. They wanted to go skateboarding. Adam lived down the road from Federal Way High School, and there was an Albertson’s grocery store nearby with a good parking lot for skating.
To get there faster, the boys did what they always did. They hopped the fence at the edge of the school campus and cut straight through the grounds. It was a shortcut they had taken dozens of times before, maybe more. It was routine. It was nothing. The morning air was brutal. It was so cold that the puddles on the ground had frozen solid overnight. As Drew and Adam walked across the campus, they did what any kids would do. They stomped on the ice. They cracked it under their shoes. It sounded like breaking glass. They laughed. They kept moving.
Two 13-year-old boys on a Saturday morning, stomping ice and heading to go skateboard. That’s all it was supposed to be. And then Drew looked up. Ahead of them, maybe 30 or 40 yards away, a man stepped out of the bushes. He just appeared. One second, the path ahead was empty. The next second, he was standing there. He came up from a low area near what used to be a dugout, a spot that was surrounded by thick bushes, tall enough to hide a person completely. The man stood up straight and looked right at them.
He stared at the two boys, and then without saying a word, he turned and started walking in the same direction they were heading. Drew felt something twist in his stomach. Something about the man didn’t feel right, but he was 13. He didn’t know what to do with that feeling, so he did what most people do when something feels wrong, but nothing has technically happened yet. He talked himself out of it. He told himself the guy had probably just been hiding in the bushes to smoke. That’s it. That’s all it was. Just some guy smoking where no one could see him.
Nothing weird, nothing dangerous. But Drew kept watching him. He couldn’t stop. Something about the way the man had looked at them. The way he had just stood there staring before turning away, it stuck in Drew’s chest like a splinter. He kept his eyes on the man as they continued walking across the campus. Then the boys reached the spot where the man had come from the bushes, the low area near the dugout, and what they saw there ended their childhood in an instant.
A young woman was lying in the dirt. It was clear that she had been tragically harmed. The scene was heartbreaking, showing signs of a violent struggle that no one could have survived. She wasn’t moving. Her eyes were open, staring up at the sky, staring up at the two boys who had just stumbled into the worst moment of their lives. She was completely still. There was no breath, no movement, nothing. Drew and Adam froze. Their brains couldn’t process what they were looking at.
This wasn’t something that happened in real life. Not in their neighborhood, not at their school, not on a Saturday morning khi they were supposed to be skateboarding. Then Drew looked back up. The man, the same man who had stepped out of the bushes just moments earlier, was now standing further ahead near a vehicle. And he wasn’t walking anymore. He had stopped. He had turned around. And he was staring directly at the two boys.
Those eyes locked onto Drew like a warning, like a dare, like he wanted them to know that he saw them and that he knew exactly what they had just found. Drew would later describe that look as the most terrifying thing he had ever experienced. He called the man the “boogeyman.” A real actual boogeyman, not from a movie, not from a nightmare. Standing right there in the cold morning light, staring at two 13-year-old boys who had just found a dead girl in the bushes behind their school.
The boys ran. They turned and sprinted back the way they came. Back across the campus, back over the fence, back to Drew’s house. Drew’s mother saw the panic in their faces and called 911 immediately. Drew’s stepfather didn’t wait. He grabbed Drew and rushed back to the scene to see if there was anything they could do to help the young woman. Khi they reached her, they knew there was nothing anyone could do. She was gone.
Police arrived within minutes, and khi they looked at the clothing near the body, they found a name: Sarah. The girl lying in the dirt behind Federal Way High School was the same girl who had rushed out of her house that morning with curlers in her hair. The same girl who thought she was late. The same girl who just wanted to make it to her drill team competition on time. Her car was still sitting in the parking lot 300 feet away. The engine had long gone cold.
On the front passenger seat, a large container of orange juice sat completely untouched, not spilled, not knocked over, just sitting there exactly where Sarah had placed it that morning, waiting for a girl who would never come back to drink it. There were no signs of a struggle inside the car or anywhere near it. No broken glass, no torn fabric, no marks on the ground around the vehicle. Whatever happened to Sarah, it didn’t start at her car. Something or someone had gotten her to leave the safety of her vehicle and walk 100 yards into the bushes.
And it happened so quickly, so quietly that she didn’t even have time to knock over a jug of orange juice. But here’s the detail that makes this even harder to accept. Drew and Adam were not the first people to see something wrong that morning. Earlier, before the boys had even left Drew’s house, a jogger had been running near the tennis courts on the school campus. He looked over and saw a girl lying motionless on the ground. A man was kneeling over her, touching her.
The jogger thought they were a couple. He assumed it was just two people together on a Saturday morning. So, he kept running. He jogged right past them. He didn’t stop. He didn’t call anyone. He just kept going. By the time he realized what he had actually seen, it was far too late. Police now had a crime scene. They had a full male DNA profile recovered from evidence on Sarah’s clothing. They had two young witnesses who had seen a man leaving the area just moments before Sarah’s body was found.
And they had a jogger who may have seen the attack in progress without knowing it. They had evidence. They had witnesses. They had DNA. In those first few hours, it felt like they had everything they needed. But there were two questions that no one could answer: How did Sarah Yarborough get from her car to those bushes? And who was the man that Drew Miller saw staring at him from across that field? Because one thing was already clear: That man knew the boys had seen his face. And the boys would never be able to forget it.
Khi investigators processed the scene behind Federal Way High School that morning, what they found told a brutal story. Investigators confirmed that Sarah’s life was taken through physical force. The details were brutal, indicating that the attacker used extreme measures to silence her. The state of the scene suggested a predatory motive with evidence that the attacker had attempted to degrade his victim. The attack was clearly driven by a desire to harm her in the worst possible way.
But here’s something important: Sarah had not been fully assaulted in the way investigators initially feared. However, DNA evidence was found on several items of her clothing. And from that evidence, the crime lab was able to develop a full male DNA profile of her attacker. They also found something else: DNA underneath Sarah’s fingernails. It matched the DNA found on her clothing, which means Sarah Yarborough did not go quietly. She fought.
She scratched at the person doing this to her. She fought for her life with everything she had. A 16-year-old girl in her drill team uniform fought back against a grown man until her body couldn’t fight anymore. And in doing so, she left a piece of her attacker behind. Evidence that would sit in a lab for almost three decades waiting. But the question that haunted investigators from the very beginning was a simple one: How?
How did Sarah get from her car to those bushes? Her vehicle was parked in the lot 300 feet away. The orange juice on the passenger seat hadn’t been touched. There was no sign of a struggle anywhere near the car. No broken windows, no scuff marks, nothing. So, she wasn’t dragged. She wasn’t carried. She walked. Somehow, for some reason, Sarah Yarborough left the safety of her car and walked willingly toward the area where she was attacked.
Early on, investigators developed a theory. They believed someone had approached Sarah and asked for her help. Maybe the person said they lost their dog. Maybe they said they couldn’t find their car keys. And Sarah, being exactly who she was, would have said yes. She was the kind of girl who helped everyone. If someone needed something, she was already moving. And whoever approached her that morning knew exactly how to use that kindness against her.
Years later, khi prosecutors finally had a suspect and could study his history, they developed a different theory, one that was much darker. Based on his pattern of past crimes, they believed the attacker had most likely used a weapon, a knife probably. He had done it before multiple times. In every previous case, he had approached women near their vehicles, made small talk, and then pulled a knife to control them.
He would force them to walk to a more secluded area away from anyone who could help. That is likely what happened to Sarah. She didn’t follow a stranger to be kind. It was forced at the point of a blade, and she had no choice but to walk. But investigators didn’t know any of that. In December of 1991, all they had was evidence, a timeline, and two terrified 13-year-old boys who had seen the man responsible.
Drew Miller and his friend Adam sat down with a police sketch artist. They described what they had seen in detail. The man was white, around 6 feet tall, medium build, but there was one feature that stuck with both of them more than anything else: his skin. The man had uneven, rough skin on his face, like acne scarring or like something was wrong with the surface of his face. It wasn’t smooth. It wasn’t clean. It was textured and noticeable even from a distance.
The boys told the sketch artist that the image they produced was highly accurate. They were confident in it. And that sketch was released to the public immediately. It was posted everywhere in store windows, on telephone polls, in every business in Federal Way, on the news, in the papers, and the tips started pouring in. Hundreds of them, then thousands. By the time the investigation was in full swing, over 3,000 tips had come in.
The volume was so massive that Sarah’s own grandfather facilitated the donation of a computer system to the King County Sheriff’s Office just so they could organize and track all the information. And with all of that, every tip, every lead, every phone call, not a single one led to an arrest. Not one. 3,000 people thought they recognized the face in that sketch. 3,000 people called in with names, with theories, with suspicions, and none of them were right.
The community of Federal Way was living in fear. Parents tightened curfews. Families double-bolted their locks. People looked at their neighbors differently because the man in that sketch could have been anyone: the guy at the grocery store, the person sitting next to you at church. He was out there and no one knew who he was. Federal Way had a monster living among them and the only thing they had was a pencil drawing and a feeling of dread that wouldn’t go away.
For Sarah’s friends, the pain went far beyond fear. It was guilt—survivor’s guilt. “Why am I still here and Sarah isn’t? Why am I filling out college applications khi Sarah wanted to go to college more than anyone? Why am I picking out a dress for prom khi Sarah will never go to prom?” Every happy moment had a shadow standing next to it. Every milestone, every celebration. There was always one person missing from the crowd.
One of Sarah’s closest friends, Shannon Grant, was the last person to see Sarah alive that Friday night. She carried that weight for decades. She wished she could go back. She wished she had asked the other drill team members what time practice really was. She wished she had offered to drive Sarah to school. She wished she had done anything that might have changed the outcome, but she couldn’t go back. None of them could.
A year and a half passed. December turned to January. January turned to spring. Spring turned to summer. And still nothing. No arrest, no suspect, no answers, just that sketch on every wall in a town full of people waiting for news that never came. On June 12th, 1993, the community gathered at Federal Way High School. It was graduation day. It also would have been Sarah Yarborough’s 18th birthday.
The class she was supposed to graduate with was walking across the stage that afternoon. But first, there was something else. A memorial had been built in the courtyard of the school, and it was time to unveil it. A man named Bill Fuller had led the effort. Bill was a close family friend of the Yarboroughs. His own daughter had been in Sarah’s class. He cared deeply about the family and he wanted to make sure Sarah was never forgotten.
The memorial was a stone bench, inscribed with the two words that defined Sarah’s life: “Carpe Diem, seize the day.” Encased in bronze around the bench were some of the things Sarah loved most: her ballet shoes, her books, and a small replica of her beloved dog, Gibby. It was beautiful. It was permanent. And khi it was unveiled that day with Sarah’s younger brother, Andrew, standing beside Bill Fuller, there were tears everywhere.
Because the bench was a reminder of everything Sarah was and everything she would never get to become. Later that same day, Sarah’s mother, Laura, did something that no one expected. She came to the graduation ceremony, not to cry, not to mourn. She came to support Sarah’s friends—the same girls who had grown up with her daughter. The same girls who were now walking across a stage that Sarah should have been walking across, too.
Laura Yarborough sat in those bleachers and cheered for every single one of them because that’s what Sarah would have done. Over the years that followed, those friends stayed close to Laura. They would call her, visit her. Some of them would even come to her before making big life decisions. They would say things like, “I’m going to date this person and I just wanted to let you know because I wasn’t sure if Sarah would approve.”
Laura became a kind of surrogate mother to them—a living connection to the girl they had lost. And in some small way, those friendships kept Sarah’s presence alive, even as the years kept passing with no justice. But there is one name from this part of the story that you need to hold on to: Bill Fuller, the family friend, the man who built the memorial. The man who stood in that courtyard and helped honor Sarah’s memory.
Remember that name, because years later, khi science finally caught up with this case, Bill Fuller’s name was going to come back. And khi it did, it would shock everyone. Now, before we go any further into the search for Sarah’s attacker, there is something you need to know. Something that the people of Federal Way didn’t learn until decades later. Something that changes everything about this case.
Because the man who took Sarah Yarborough’s life on that freezing December morning in 1991 had done this before and he should have still been locked up khi it happened. He should have been sitting in a prison cell on the morning Sarah drove to school. But he wasn’t. And the reason he wasn’t is a failure so enormous, so preventable, so painfully obvious that once you hear it, you will never look at this case the same way again.
To understand that failure, we need to go back 8 years before Sarah’s death to a quiet morning along the Columbia River in Richland, Washington. It was June of 1983. A 21-year-old woman named Anne Crony had driven to a park near the riverfront. She wanted to sit by the water and think. It was a peaceful morning. She was alone. She leaned against the hood of her car and watched the river.
There was nothing unusual about the day, nothing that felt dangerous, just a young woman and the sound of water. Then, a man walked up to her. He was young, 19 years old. He seemed normal, friendly, actually. He struck up a conversation like it was the most natural thing in the world. He told her his name was Pat Nicholas. He said he had just moved to the area.
Anne asked him if he had been water skiing yet because that was a popular thing to do on the river around there. He smiled and said, “No, I can’t swim.” They talked for a few minutes. It was small talk, nothing deep, nothing alarming. But then Anne noticed something. His voice started to change. It was getting shaky, unsteady, like something underneath the surface was shifting. She couldn’t explain it, but the feeling in her gut changed.
She wasn’t comfortable anymore. She told him she had to go. She turned toward her car and reached for the door. And that’s khi she felt the threat of a weapon, a knife. The friendly young man who couldn’t swim was now standing behind her with a weapon to her neck. He attempted to force her into a terrifying situation, demanding her compliance while ensuring she couldn’t call for help.
And then he started walking her away from the car, down toward the riverbank, away from the road, away from anyone who might see them. They were about halfway down the bank khi he told her to stop. And in that moment, standing on the edge of the Columbia River with a man who had a knife and every intention of destroying her life, Anne Crony remembered one thing, one single detail from their conversation just minutes earlier.
He said he couldn’t swim. Anne didn’t think. She ran. She sprinted toward the water and dove in. She hit the river and started swimming as hard as she could. She swam with everything she had. She swam for her life. The man stood on the bank. He didn’t follow. He couldn’t. The water was the one place he couldn’t reach her.
People at a nearby dock spotted Anne in the river and pulled her out. They called the police. It didn’t take long for investigators to identify the man. His name was Patrick Leon Nicholas. He was 19 years old. And here is where this story takes a turn that will make your blood run cold. Patrick Nicholas was no stranger to law enforcement. He had been in trouble before, not for small things, not for petty crimes.
He had been convicted as a juvenile for the assault of two women and the attempted assault of a third. He was a teenager khi those crimes happened. And his pattern was identical every single time: He would approach a woman near her vehicle. He would make small talk to get her comfortable. Then he would pull a knife. He would force her to undress. And he would walk her to a more remote area where he could do whatever he wanted without being seen.
That was his method. That was who he was. At 19 years old, Patrick Nicholas had already harmed multiple women in the exact same way. And he had been released from custody for his most recent offense just a few months before he attacked Anne Crony. A few months. That’s all the freedom he needed before he did it again. After his arrest for attacking Anne, Nicholas sat in a police interview room and said something investigators would never forget.
He said, “I realize I have dangerous impulses toward young women. My intent was to commit a serious assault that day. And I know it wasn’t right.” He knew what he was. He told them what he was. He said it out loud. Nicholas plead guilty to one charge of first-degree attempted assault. Anne Crony came to the sentencing hearing. She was angry. She was shaken. But she was alive.
And she stood in front of the judge and asked for the maximum sentence. The judge agreed. Patrick Nicholas was sentenced to 10 years in prison. 10 years. Anne walked out of that courtroom believing that justice had been served. She believed he would sit behind bars for a full decade. She thought it was over. She moved on with her life. She barely thought about Patrick Nicholas again.
But here is where the system broke. Here is where everything fell apart. Patrick Nicholas did not serve 10 years. He didn’t even serve half. Prison records showed that he had no major infractions khi locked up. No drug or alcohol problems. One evaluation described him as someone who “would be safe to be at large given an ongoing therapeutic relationship and parole supervision.” Safe to be at large.
Those words were written about a man who had assaulted multiple women as a teenager and attacked another at knife point at 19. Safe to be at large. In 1987, after serving just three and a half years of his 10-year sentence, Patrick Nicholas was released from prison. He was put into an outpatient treatment program for offenders. And then he disappeared off the radar, out of the system.
No one was watching. No one was tracking. No one was paying attention to where Patrick Nicholas went or what Patrick Nicholas did. Anne Crony didn’t know he was out. She had no idea he had been released early. She thought he was still locked up. She thought the system had done its job. She was wrong. Now, think about this: Patrick Nicholas was sentenced to 10 years in 1983.
If he had served his full sentence—every single day of those 10 years—he would not have been released until 1993. He would have still been sitting in a prison cell on the morning of December 14th, 1991. He would have still been behind bars khi Sarah Yarborough drove to Federal Way High School with curlers in her hair. He would have been locked in a room behind a door behind a wall instead of standing in the bushes of a school campus waiting for a 16-year-old girl to walk by.
If the system had worked the way it was supposed to, Sarah Yarborough would be alive today. She would have graduated. She would have gone to college. She would have become a museum curator or an engineer. She would have lived. But the system didn’t work. And Sarah paid for that failure with her life. Anne Crony didn’t learn any of this until 2019 khi detectives knocked on her door in Oregon and told her that Patrick Nicholas had been arrested again.
This time for the taking of a young girl’s life, Anne was crushed. She said something that she had never once considered in all the years since her attack. She said, “It had never occurred to me that what I escaped from was a murderer.” The man who held a knife to her throat by the Columbia River in 1983 was the same man responsible for taking Sarah Yarborough’s life in 1991. And the only reason he was free to do it was because someone decided he was “safe to be at large.”
After his release in 1987, Nicholas vanished into the background of everyday life. No one was looking for him. No one was watching. He moved around. He blended in. And for years, no one had any idea what he was doing or who he was hurting until a freezing cold Saturday morning at a high school parking lot khi a girl with red hair and a bright smile showed up an hour too early.
Years passed and then more years passed. The sketch of the man the boys had seen stayed pinned to bulletin boards and taped to windows across Federal Way, but the face in that drawing never got a name. By the early 2000s, investigators had worked through over 3,000 tips. They had submitted the DNA from Sarah’s crime scene to the CODIS database, a national system that stores DNA profiles of convicted offenders, and run it again and again and again.
Every time a new profile was added to the system, detectives checked. Every time the technology improved, they resubmitted. And every single time, the result came back the same: No match. It didn’t make sense. Investigators had a full male DNA profile from the scene. They knew exactly what this man’s genetic fingerprint looked like, but he wasn’t in the system anywhere, which meant one of two things:
Either he had never committed another crime that required a DNA sample, or he had and somehow slipped through the cracks. For a man capable of what was done to Sarah Yarborough, the idea that he had never offended again was almost impossible to believe. Something was wrong. Something was missing. And detectives knew they had to try a completely different approach.
In 2011, 20 years after Sarah’s death, a detective named Jim Allen made a phone call that would eventually change everything. He reached out to a woman named Colleen Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick ran a company called Identifinders International, and she was doing something that almost no one in law enforcement had ever heard of. She was using consumer DNA databases—the kind that regular people use to explore their ancestry and find distant relatives—to generate investigative leads for unsolved crimes.
The field didn’t even have a proper name yet. Forensic genetic genealogy was in its absolute infancy. It barely existed, and most law enforcement agencies wanted nothing to do with it. Fitzpatrick herself would later say that police thought she was crazy. She described being almost laughed out of the room khi she tried to explain what she could do, but the King County Sheriff’s Office was different.
They had been working Sarah’s case for two decades. They had tried everything and they were desperate. Khi Fitzpatrick offered to take a look at the DNA from Sarah’s crime scene for free just to see if her methods would work, they said yes. What did they have to lose? What happened next was something no one expected. Fitzpatrick took the DNA profile from the crime scene and compared it to profiles available in public genealogy databases.
Specifically, she focused on the Y chromosome, which is passed from father to son generation after generation, virtually unchanged. And she found a match, not to the killer himself, but to his family line. The Y chromosome from Sarah’s crime scene matched a group of people who were all descendants of the same man, a man named Robert Fuller.
Robert Fuller had lived in Salem, Massachusetts in the 1630s. His family had come to North America on the Mayflower. This was the first time in history that a cold case had generated investigative leads using consumer DNA databases. Sarah Yarborough’s case was making history, even if no one realized it yet. Now, the connection to Robert Fuller meant that Sarah’s killer was a direct male descendant of this colonial-era family.
The Y chromosome had been passed down from father to son for nearly 400 years—from the 1600s all the way to the man who took Sarah’s life in 1991. But Robert Fuller had lived almost four centuries ago. He had thousands of descendants alive today. Knowing the family name was a start, but it wasn’t enough. It was like knowing the killer lived somewhere on Earth. The pool was still enormous.
But then the name Fuller triggered something with detectives because they already knew a Fuller: Bill Fuller, the Yarborough family’s close friend. The man who had built Sarah’s memorial bench at Federal Way High School. The man who had stood in that courtyard with Sarah’s brother Andrew and unveiled the tribute to her memory. Naturally, this raised immediate questions.
Police asked Bill Fuller to provide a DNA sample, and Bill didn’t hesitate. Not for a second. He walked in and gave it willingly. He cooperated fully. He had nothing to hide. And khi the results came back, his DNA was not a match to the crime scene. Bill Fuller did not harm Sarah Yarborough. But here’s where it got strange: His Y chromosome, the part of DNA that traces the male family line, was a match.
Bill Fuller and Sarah’s killer shared the same paternal ancestry. They were both descendants of Robert Fuller from the 1600s. They were paternal cousins, not close cousins—distant ones, too distant to narrow down a suspect. But the connection was real. So now investigators were in the most bizarre situation imaginable. They knew the killer’s family tree going back to the Mayflower.
They could trace his bloodline through four centuries of American history, but they still didn’t know his name. They didn’t know his face. They didn’t know where he lived. The Fuller family tree branched out in hundreds of directions over hundreds of years, and the killer was hiding somewhere in those branches. Other people with the Fuller surname living in the area were investigated. None of them were tied to Sarah’s case. The lead, as promising as it had been, dried up, and the case went cold again.
But Colleen Fitzpatrick didn’t give up. She kept working quietly in the background year after year, and the technology kept evolving around her. In 2018, something massive happened in the world of forensic genetic genealogy. The Golden State Killer, one of the most notorious criminals in American history, was identified and arrested using the same kind of DNA database comparison that Fitzpatrick had pioneered. That case changed everything.
It proved to the world that genetic genealogy wasn’t just some fringe idea from a woman that police laughed at. It was real. It worked. And it was going to solve cases that nothing else could. Fitzpatrick’s team went back to work on Sarah’s case with renewed energy and better tools. The databases had grown. More people had uploaded their DNA profiles to ancestry sites. The pool of potential matches was bigger. The methods were sharper.
And this time, they found what they were looking for. In September of 2019, eight years after Fitzpatrick first started working on this case, her team made a breakthrough. They identified two brothers: Edward Nicholas and Patrick Nicholas. Both men were distant cousins of Bill Fuller. Both were descendants of Robert Fuller from Salem, Massachusetts. But their last name wasn’t Fuller. It was Nicholas.
And the reason for that was simple: Their grandfather had been adopted. He was born into the Fuller bloodline, but raised under a different name. The genetic connection was there, but it had been hidden behind a legal name change that happened generations ago. That’s why no one had ever found them. The killer’s surname didn’t match his DNA. He had been invisible the entire time.
Now, detectives had two possible suspects, two brothers. One of them had to be Sarah’s killer. They started with Edward Nicholas. Edward was a convicted offender, a registered sex offender. His DNA had been entered into CODIS back in 2005, 14 years earlier. And khi they checked his profile against the crime scene DNA, it wasn’t a match.
Edward Nicholas was not the man who harmed Sarah Yarborough, which left one person: his younger brother, Patrick Leon Nicholas. Patrick Nicholas was not in CODIS. Despite everything he had done—the juvenile offenses, the attack on Anne Crony, the conviction for harming a six-year-old child in 1993—his DNA had never been entered into any criminal database.
Three separate times the system had failed to capture his profile. Three chances to stop him. Three chances missed. Detectives now believed they knew who had been hiding in those bushes at Federal Way High School on the morning of December 14th, 1991. But believing wasn’t enough. They needed proof. They needed Patrick Nicholas’s DNA, and they needed to get it without him knowing.
Because if he found out they were looking at him, he could run. He had done it before. After attacking Anne Crony in 1983, he had withdrawn money from his bank account and fled town within hours. He knew how to disappear. So, the King County Sheriff’s Office put together a plan. A team of undercover detectives was assigned to follow Patrick Nicholas quietly, carefully, invisibly, and wait for him to leave behind something with his DNA on it.
A cup, a napkin, a cigarette, anything. All they needed was one piece of garbage, one discarded item. One moment of carelessness from a man who had avoided detection for 28 years. And Patrick Nicholas had no idea anyone was watching. On September 29th, 2019, a team of undercover detectives from the King County Sheriff’s Office began following a 55-year-old man through the streets of a small town south of Seattle.
They kept their distance. They stayed invisible, and they watched everything he did. The man’s name was Patrick Leon Nicholas, and detectives had already built a picture of who he had become. Nicholas was divorced. He lived alone in a run-down building on a large property in Covington, Washington. The place had no working electricity. No one visited him. He had no children, no friends, no connections to anyone.
He worked at an auto parts store and took the bus everywhere because he didn’t drive. He was a man living on the edges of society, invisible, forgotten—exactly the kind of person who could go 28 years without anyone ever suspecting him of anything. But there was one detail that stopped detectives cold khi they discovered it: The bus route that Patrick Nicholas regularly took passed directly by Federal Way High School, the same school where Sarah Yarborough had been found in December of 1991.
Back then, Nicholas was 27 years old. He lived 6 miles from the school, and he had access to that campus every single day just by riding the bus. None of that was proof. Detectives knew that. What they needed was his DNA, and they needed to get it without tipping him off. So, they waited, they followed, and they watched. Then, it happened.
Detectives trailed Nicholas to a laundromat near a strip mall in Kent. He went inside to do his laundry. After a while, he stepped outside. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it. He smoked it slowly. Then, he lit another one. Khi he was done, he dropped both cigarette butts on the ground. A paper napkin slipped out of his pocket and fell to the sidewalk next to them.
Nicholas didn’t pick any of it up. He just walked back inside. The moment he was out of sight, the undercover team moved in. They collected both cigarette butts and the napkin from the sidewalk. Three items, three tiny pieces of garbage that a man had thrown away without thinking twice. They bagged them, sealed them, and rushed them to the Washington State Patrol crime lab.
And then they waited. For days, the detectives sat with their phones close, knowing that the answer to a 28-year-old mystery was sitting in a lab somewhere being processed. Every hour felt like a week. And then the call came. The DNA on the cigarette butts matched the DNA found on Sarah Yarborough’s clothing in 1991. It was a perfect match.
The odds of it being anyone other than Patrick Nicholas were 1 in 120 quadrillion. That’s a number so large it’s almost meaningless. To put it in perspective, there are only about 8 billion people on Earth. The chances of this DNA belonging to someone else were essentially zero. 28 years of searching, 28 years of dead ends, 3,000 tips that led nowhere. And the answer came from two cigarette butts on a sidewalk outside a laundromat.
On October 2nd, 2019, detectives tracked Patrick Nicholas to a sports bar in downtown Kent called Nashville’s. They walked in, identified him, and placed him under arrest for the first-degree murder of Sarah Yarborough. He was transported to the King County Jail and booked that night. Prosecutors requested bail be set at $5 million.
The charging documents described Nicholas as a man whose crime was one of opportunity and extreme violence and who would always be considered a danger to the community. Then came the interrogation. Nicholas was brought into an interview room. Detectives sat across from him and told him why he was there. They told them they were investigating the death of a young girl named Sarah.
And what happened next sent a chill through every detective in that room. Nicholas didn’t react the way an innocent person would. He didn’t say he had no idea what they were talking about. He didn’t say they had the wrong guy. Instead, he asked a question. He asked what year this happened. “What year?” As if there were multiple years it could have been. As if there were multiple girls it could have been about.
That question hung in the air like smoke, and it made the detectives wonder something terrifying: Were there others? Was Sarah the only one, or was there more that they didn’t know about? Nicholas spoke with detectives for about 90 minutes. He didn’t confess. He didn’t break down. And then he asked for a lawyer. The interview was over. He shut down completely and never said another word. But the search of his home told its own story.
Khi detectives entered the building where Nicholas had been living, what they found was disturbing. The place was dark. No electricity. Stacks of newspapers and magazines were piled everywhere, covering almost every surface. It looked like the home of a man who had completely disconnected from normal life. But two items stood out from the mess.
The first was a newspaper from 1994. It was old and yellowed, and on its front page was an article about the Sarah Yarborough case. He had kept it. For 25 years, Patrick Nicholas had held on to a newspaper about the girl he had harmed. It had been sitting in his house the entire time. The second item was found in a kitchen drawer: a photograph torn from a magazine. It showed a young woman in a cheerleading outfit.
It had been ripped carefully from the page and placed in the drawer by itself. Khi prosecutors later showed that photograph in the courtroom during trial, the air left the room. Everyone understood what it meant. Everyone understood what kind of person they were dealing with. In the 28 years since Sarah’s death, nearly 4,000 tips had been submitted to the King County Sheriff’s Office.
4,000 names, 4,000 theories, 4,000 phone calls from people who thought they knew who did it. Patrick Leon Nicholas was not named in a single one of them. Not once. He had lived in the area the entire time. He had a record of violent offenses. He had been arrested multiple times and still no one ever pointed a finger at him. He was invisible, a ghost hiding in plain sight.
Shortly after the arrest, detectives in the Seattle area reached out to law enforcement in Oregon. They asked them to visit a woman named Anne Crony. The officers knocked on her door and told her that detectives in Seattle wanted to speak with her about a cold case. They told her that Patrick Nicholas, the same man who had held a knife to her throat by the Columbia River in 1983, had been arrested.
But not for what he did to her—for something far worse—for the taking of a 16-year-old girl’s life. Anne was devastated. For 36 years, she had lived with the memory of that day by the river. She had moved on. She had told herself that justice was served khi Nicholas went to prison. She believed he had served all 10 years. She had no idea he was released after 3 and a half.
And she had never once considered that the man who attacked her was capable of ending someone’s life. Khi the detectives told her what Nicholas had done to Sarah Yarborough, she said something that she would repeat many times in the years that followed. She said, “It had never occurred to me that what I escaped from was a murderer.”
The news of the arrest spread fast, and for the people who had loved Sarah and waited for answers for nearly three decades, it was a moment that cracked them open all over again. Laura Yarborough, Sarah’s mother, had spent 28 years living with the weight of not knowing. There were times she gave up hope, times she thought the case would never be solved.
But through it all, the detectives working the case kept telling her the same thing. They told her that eventually technology would catch up, that one day science would do what traditional investigation couldn’t. Laura trusted them, and on the night of October 2nd, 2019, those same detectives were finally able to give her the news she had been waiting almost three decades to hear. They told her they had found the man who took her daughter.
Laura would later say, “Even khi I had given up, the detectives never did.” But the arrest was not the end. It was just the beginning of a new fight because Patrick Nicholas was not going to admit what he did. He was going to go to trial and his defense was going to challenge everything: the DNA, the witnesses, the science, and the very technology that had finally put a name to the face in that sketch. The fight for justice was far from over.
3 and 1/2 years passed between the arrest and the trial. 3 and 1/2 years of motions, hearings, delays, and legal battles fought behind closed doors. But on April 17th, 2023, more than 31 years after Sarah Yarborough was found behind her high school, the case finally went to trial. Patrick Leon Nicholas, now 59 years old, walked into the Norm Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent, Washington.
He sat down at the defense table. He showed no emotion. He said nothing. And across the courtroom, filling the gallery behind the prosecution, were the people who had waited a lifetime for this moment: Sarah’s mother, Laura; her brother, Andrew; her childhood friends; Drew Miller, the boy who had found her body khi he was 13. They were all there, and they were terrified.
Not because they doubted the evidence, but because they knew something that the jury did not. Before the trial even started, the judge had made a ruling that hit the prosecution hard. Patrick Nicholas’s criminal history—his juvenile convictions, his attack on Anne Crony, his later offense against the child—none of it could be presented to the jury.
The judge determined that allowing the jury to hear about his past crimes would be unfairly prejudicial to the defendant, which meant the 12 people deciding Nicholas’s fate would never know that the man sitting in front of them had a documented pattern of violent behavior stretching back to his teenage years. They would only see the evidence from Sarah’s case, nothing else.
The prosecution was led by two King County deputy prosecuting attorneys, Celia Lee and Mary Barbosa. Their strategy was built entirely around the DNA, the science, the numbers. They needed the jury to trust what the evidence was telling them. And the evidence was telling a very clear story. The defense was handled by a public defender named David Montes. And Montes had a plan of his own.
He wasn’t going to argue that the DNA at the crime scene didn’t exist. He couldn’t. What he was going to do was attack the way that DNA had led investigators to his client. He was going to put genetic genealogy itself on trial, and this had never been done before in Washington state. Montes called the technology “wacky.” He called it untested, unproven.
He told the jury that police had spent decades chasing dead ends and that in their desperation, they had turned to a hobbyist using unproven methods and that those methods had pointed them to the wrong man. He argued that the investigators needed an answer more than they needed the right answer. And so they grabbed onto the first name that the science gave them.
Then Montes went after the eyewitness testimony. Drew Miller and his friend Adam had told police in 1991 that the man they saw leaving the bushes had uneven, rough skin on his face, like acne scarring or like something was visibly wrong with his complexion. Montes pointed out that Patrick Nicholas had clear skin at the time—no acne, no scarring, no visible marks.
He argued that his client simply could not have been the man the boys saw that morning because the physical description didn’t match. It was a smart argument, but the prosecution had an answer, and it was one that landed hard. Sarah Yarborough’s DNA had been found under her own fingernails. She had scratched her attacker. She had clawed at him as he was taking her life.
The prosecution argued that the uneven textured skin the boys saw on the man’s face may not have been acne at all. It may have been fresh scratch marks left by Sarah herself. In the final moments of her life, she had fought so hard that she marked the face of the man who was hurting her. And those marks were still visible khi Drew and Adam saw him walking out of the bushes minutes later.
Then came the evidence from Nicholas’s home. Prosecutors showed the jury what detectives had found during the search of his house after his arrest: the stacks of old newspapers, the lack of electricity, the total isolation, and then the two items that changed the temperature of the courtroom—the 1994 newspaper with Sarah Yarborough’s case on the front page, kept for 25 years, and the torn photograph of a young woman in a cheerleading outfit found in a kitchen drawer.
Khi those images were displayed in court, people in the gallery described the moment as suffocating. The oxygen left the room. Everyone understood what they were looking at. Everyone understood who this man was, even if the jury had never been told about his past. But perhaps the most powerful moment of the trial came khi Sarah’s clothing was brought into the courtroom.
Her drill team jacket, her shoes, her sweater, her nylon stockings. These items had been sealed in evidence storage for over 30 years. And khi the retired detective who had first responded to the scene carefully unpackaged each piece and displayed them for the court, it was like opening a time capsule. These weren’t photographs. These weren’t descriptions.
These were the actual things Sarah had been wearing on the morning she died. The jacket she had thrown on khi she thought she was late. The shoes she had laced up in a rush. The stockings that had been used to end her life. People in the gallery felt themselves crumble. 32 years of distance collapsed in an instant. Sarah was right there in that room in those clothes.
The DNA numbers were staggering. The crime lab had tested the samples and found that Nicholas’s DNA matched on 13 out of 13 genetic markers tested from evidence on Sarah’s sweatshirt and drill team jacket. The probability of it being someone else was 1 in 20 quadrillion. And the DNA recovered from under Sarah’s fingernails—the DNA she had torn from her attacker as she fought for her life—was 590 billion times more likely to have come from Nicholas than from any unrelated person.
Those weren’t debatable numbers. Those weren’t close calls. That was certainty—as close to certainty as science can ever get. The trial lasted 9 days. 9 days of testimony, evidence, arguments, and emotion. And then the case was handed to the jury. They deliberated for a day and a half. And khi they came back into the courtroom, Sarah’s family and friends were shaking.
The adrenaline was unbearable. 32 years of grief and fear and waiting had come down to this moment. These next few words from the jury foreperson would determine whether any of it had been worth it. The first charge was read: premeditated first-degree murder. The jury’s verdict: not guilty. The sound that followed was like the air being punched out of the room.
Sarah’s friends dropped their heads into their hands. Laura Yarborough closed her eyes. Not guilty on the first charge—the most serious charge—the one that said Nicholas had planned this in advance. The jury didn’t believe it had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. And in that moment, it felt like everything was falling apart. But there were more charges, and the foreperson kept reading.
“Second charge: First-degree murder committed during the commission of an attempted assault. The jury’s verdict: guilty.” “Third charge: Second-degree murder committed while also committing indecent liberties. The jury’s verdict: guilty.” And then the special verdict—the jury was asked one additional question: Was the taking of Sarah Yarborough’s life sexually motivated? Their answer: “Yes.”
The courtroom broke. Sarah’s family and friends sobbed openly. 32 years of silence and suffering came pouring out in that room. Drew Miller, the man who had found Sarah’s body khi he was just a boy, looked across the courtroom and made eye contact with one of the jurors. The juror nodded at him—a small gesture, but it carried the weight of everything. It said, “We heard you. We believed you. We got it right.”
Patrick Nicholas sat at the defense table through all of it. He didn’t react khi the not-guilty verdict was read. He didn’t react khi the guilty verdicts came. He showed nothing. No remorse, no relief, no fear—just nothing. The same emptiness he had carried for 32 years. The same blank face that had stared back at two 13-year-old boys from across a field on a December morning in 1991.
The conviction was in. But the story wasn’t over. Because two weeks later, everyone would gather in that courtroom one more time. And what happened at the sentencing hearing would be the most powerful moment in this entire case. 2 weeks after the verdict on May the 25th, 2023, the courtroom at the Norm Maleng Regional Justice Center filled up once more.
But this time, it was different. This wasn’t about evidence or arguments or legal strategy. This was about something much more raw. This was the sentencing hearing and dozens of people connected to Sarah Yarborough’s life and to her case had come to say what they had been holding inside for 32 years. They came to speak directly to the man who had taken her from them.
And they came to make sure the judge understood exactly what Patrick Nicholas had destroyed. Laura Yarborough was the first to stand. She walked to the podium and said, “Sarah was our only daughter and the delight of my life.” She described her daughter the way only a mother could: Sarah planted flowers every spring. She helped her brothers with their homework. She loved museums and ballet. She once told her mother that she felt alive khi she danced.
Laura talked about the life Sarah had planned. And then she talked about what was taken. She said, “My husband and I have about 3 years of our lives that we don’t even remember. I could barely get out of bed. Our lives went from full color to a fuzzy gray.” Then Andrew Yarborough stood—Sarah’s youngest brother. He was 11 khi Sarah was taken—a grown man now.
He told the court that what he remembered most was the pain in his father’s voice over the phone telling him Sarah was gone. He remembered his parents crying through the walls at night as he lay in bed. And he looked toward Nicholas and said, “He does not possess the ability to feel remorse the way normal people do. He does not belong in free society.”
One by one, Sarah’s friends took the podium. They spoke about milestones that should have been celebrations but were always shadowed by loss: graduations, weddings, the births of their children. One friend described how their school had been ill-equipped to deal with Sarah’s death, how some classmates had even blamed Sarah for what happened.
Another spoke about the decades of fear—how trusting strangers became impossible, how they still double-checked their locks, how they parent their own children with a vigilance that comes from knowing the worst can happen. And then Anne Crony stood up—the woman who had escaped Patrick Nicholas by jumping into the Columbia River in 1983.
The woman who had swam for her life. The woman whose testimony the judge had ruled could not be heard during the trial. She had traveled to that courtroom to say what she had not been allowed to say before. Khi Anne rose from her seat, something happened that no one expected: Patrick Nicholas—the man who had shown zero emotion throughout his entire trial—did a double take.
He looked at Anne and his body visibly shuddered. He recognized her after all those years. He never expected to see her face again. He never expected to hear her name again. And in that moment, for the first time in the entire case, something cracked behind those empty eyes. Anne stood at the podium and spoke clearly. She told the court what Nicholas had done to her.
She told them about the knife, the river, the swim that saved her life. And then she said the words that echoed through that courtroom like a verdict of their own. She said, “We rely on a system of justice that is designed to protect us from predators like Nicholas. And this system failed me. It failed Sarah, her family, her friends, and countless others. I asked the court to please not make the same mistake.”
Judge Josephine Wiggs had listened to every word, every statement, every letter that had been submitted. And before she delivered the sentence, she spoke from the bench with a weight that silenced the room. She talked about Sarah. She called her a child. She said, “Khi I think about this poor child, what she experienced fighting for her life,” and as she said it, she brought her fist down on the bench.
The impact of that gesture rippled through the gallery. This wasn’t just a judge reading a sentence. This was a human being responding to something that offended her to her core. Judge Wiggs sentenced Patrick Leon Nicholas to 548 months in prison—45 years and 8 months. It was beyond the standard sentencing range, but the jury’s special finding that the crime was sexually motivated allowed for an exceptional sentence.
It was exactly what prosecutors had asked for, and it meant one thing: Patrick Nicholas, at 59 years old, would almost certainly die behind bars. He would never walk free again. But here is what everyone in that courtroom already knew: The system had failed—not once, not twice. Three separate times, Patrick Nicholas had slipped through the cracks of a system that was supposed to keep people safe.
His juvenile convictions happened before CODIS existed, so his DNA was never collected. His 1993 arrest for harming a child should have required a DNA sample under state law, but he was allowed to plead down to a lesser charge that didn’t require it. And his brother Edward’s DNA had been sitting in CODIS since 2005.
If Washington state had allowed familial DNA searches the way California does, the way New York does, the way Florida and the United Kingdom do, detectives could have compared the crime scene DNA to Edward’s profile, seen the family connection, and identified Patrick Nicholas as a suspect in 2005—14 years before he was actually caught.
But Washington doesn’t allow familial DNA searches. The legislation doesn’t exist. And because of that, Patrick Nicholas remained free for 14 more years. Prosecutors said after the trial that they believed the law should be changed. The Yarborough family agreed. Laura Yarborough said she wanted to know that other parents wouldn’t have to wait 30 years for answers.
In 2025, Nicholas’s appeal was heard by the Washington Court of Appeals. His attorneys argued that the DNA evidence should not have been admitted and that collecting his DNA from a discarded cigarette was unconstitutional. The court rejected both arguments. The conviction was upheld. However, the court ordered a resentencing on the exceptional sentence length due to a technical issue. The conviction itself stands. Patrick Nicholas remains behind bars.
Sarah Yarborough’s case holds a place in history. It was the first cold case ever to use consumer DNA databases to generate investigative leads. What Colleen Fitzpatrick started in 2011 opened the door for hundreds of other families to find answers. Case after case solved using the same technique born from the search for Sarah’s attacker. It was the beginning.
Laura Yarborough said after the sentencing that she tries to give Nicholas as little space in her head as possible. She doesn’t say his name if she can help it. She thinks about Sarah instead. About the flowers she planted, the dances she performed. The smile that never faded. Drew Miller, the man who found Sarah’s body at 13 and carried that image for over 30 years, said something at the end of it all that might be the most important thing:
“Knowing he’s in prison is fantastic. But knowing her family and friends is way more important to me because that’s what’s given me the actual healing I needed.” After 32 years, it wasn’t the punishment that healed him. It was the connection, the people, the love that had somehow survived all that darkness.
Sarah Yarborough lived by two words: “Carpe Diem, seize the day.” And she did. Every single day of her 16 years. She danced. She studied. She helped. She smiled. She dreamed. She lived more in 16 years than most people live in 80. Until one freezing December morning, someone stole all of her remaining days.
Every graduation, every birthday cake, every quiet evening with people she loved—all of it gone. But 32 years later, the people who loved Sarah Yarborough seized something back. They seized justice. They seized answers. They seized the right to say his name out loud in a courtroom and make him answer for what he did. Sarah didn’t get to seize any more days, but the people she left behind seized every single one it took to find the truth.
Carpe Diem, Sarah. The day was finally seized.
