Patrick Leon Nicholas, left, and Sarah Yarborough, right. (King County Sheriff’s Office)
Sarah Yarborough was 16 when she was killed in the parking lot of Federal Way High School in December 1991. More than 30 years later, a man has finally been convicted of her murder in the cold case that had long baffled the Washington State Police.
Patrick Leon Nicholas, 59, was found guilty of one count of first-degree murder with sexual intent and second-degree murder by King County jurors on Wednesday afternoon. He was acquitted of one count of premeditated first degree murder.
The King County Sheriff’s Office announced the arrest of Nicholas in October 2019, who was arrested after all these decades based on “advanced ancestry DNA techniques.”
When Yarborough was raped and murdered, she was on her way to a drill team event. She had borrowed her father’s car and driven to school with curlers still in her hair the morning of his death. Her body was found by a 12-year-old boy and a 13-year-old boy who had cut through the bushes as a shortcut to school.
The boys and a jogger provided police with enough details about the suspect for a cartoonist to produce an image of the likely killer – a man who had been seen hastily leaving the bushes and continuing to throw punches at them. suspicious looks as he walked away.
The sketch of Sarah Yarborough’s murderer. (King County Sheriff’s Office)
During the trial that began April 18, the defense claimed Nicholas did not fit the description of the killer and challenged the qualifications and reliability of the state’s forensic expert.
These efforts were not enough.
“Nothing will bring Sarah back, but this is as much justice as we can all hope for after so many years, and we’re so grateful the verdict is what it was,” said Mary Beth Thome, a friend of childhood from Yarborough, Kent. Journalist. “He hurt several people in his life. Not just Sara. … He can’t hurt anyone else anymore.
Senior Assistant District Attorney Celia Lee told jurors that Nicholas himself provided investigators with “essential corroborating information” before realizing he was a suspect, according to the Seattle Times.
“After leaving the safety of her car, her attacker drove or dragged her” into the bushes where her lifeless body was found, the prosecutor allegedly told the jury. And as she was attacked, Yarborough scratched the man who killed her as she was “fighting for her life”.
Experts showed that the DNA taken from under the girl’s fingernails and the semen stains on her clothes “came from a single male contributor”, Lee said, according to the newspaper.
For years, the state admitted during the three-week trial, DNA was analyzed by the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, a database that has led to convictions in several cold cases. But CODIS never helped with Yarborough’s case.
Then, in 2019, King County Detective Kathleen Decker uploaded the crime scene DNA to another database and came back with two possible matches, the accused and his brother.
The convicted killer’s brother already had his DNA in the federal database. Eliminating him was easy.
So the detectives started watching Nicholas. They eventually recovered cigarette butts and a used towel, which he dumped in a mall. Then the state police tested the DNA. They have found their match.
Patrick Leon Nicholas in a 1994 photo. (King County Sheriff’s Office)
Nicholas was arrested in a bar in Kent.
His sentencing is scheduled for May 25.
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