The Brutal Killing of Sarah Yarborough

0:06 Welcome to Unspeakable, a true crime podcast where I tell stories of real crimes with real victims, whose cases are so shocking that many are left wondering how is this even real? I use my experiences in law enforcement, corrections, and combined with my years as a criminal justice educator, dig deep into complex cases of evil acts, some so evil many feel they are unspeakable. Warning.

0:51 Unspeakable as intended for mature audiences. If you are easily offended, then I'm not your girl. Listening discretion is advised. Hey y'all, it's kJ here, back for another episode of Unspeakable. I've got some shout outs I want to get to because I'm telling y'all, we have got some from all over the world. And this tickled me to no end. Because I'm going to start out, I had to google it. I'm not gonna lie with South Africa. Yes, South Africa, oh my god. And Pola Kwani or Pola Kwani yeah, Pola qwany Limpopo. Did I say that right? I hope I did, because sonya milan girl, I know somebody in South Africa. Y'all. What hey girl? Thank you so much for joining my crime family. I'm so stoked to have you. And then I got a bunch of local people too. I've got right here in Denham Springs, Louisiana, Nicole Harris, Hi Nicole. I've got Kaylee Elizabeth and if I'm not mistaken, she's one of my former students. Hey, Kaylee girl, how are you? She got married recently. I've got Hannah Herring from Zachary, Louisiana, which, by the way, I went to elementary school with Hannah.

2:00 Hey girl, all good to have you here. It's so special when people you know support you, so it means so much to me. I've got Dina Mendoza from Homa, Louisiana, which I'm familiar with Homa. We used to have a camp out that way. We love to fish in my family. And then we've got let's see from Sterling Heights, Michigan, Miss Amber Jackson. Hi Amber, I've never been to Michigan. I've spoken about Michigan though. If you've listened to some of my recent episodes. We have a guy that likes to kill his his ex wife's you know your boyfriend. If you haven't listened to that one, go check it out. And then I've got Hanover Township, Pennsylvania. Miss Stephanie Howard, Hi, Stephanie, thank you so very much. Let's see Lynnwood, Washington. Lynnwood, Washington, I've never been there before. This is Miss Andrea McCollum. Or Andrea, which one is it? You tell me, girl, Andrea McCollum.

2:55 I'm so incredibly thankful to have each and every one of y'all supporting me. If I haven't given you your shout out yet, it's coming, I promise. Hanging there, there's just so many of y'all, I've got to go just bit by bit, but hang in there. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for supporting me. I couldn't do it without you. I literally could not do it without you. You're the reason, and so I just cannot thank you enough. This episode is going to start out in Washington as well. So this is going to be in Federal Way, Washington. And this is a city in King County and it's part of the Seattle metropolitan area. So if you're not from there, I wanted to give you a little bit of I guess location. And it's going to be the home of sixteen year old Sarah Yarborough. Now she is a talented young girl. She's creative and kind, she's smiley and happy, and she's got this fiery red curly hair. And looking at her, I don't know why, but she kind of reminded me of the book I read when I was younger, Sarah, plain and tall. She's not full of makeup. She's not older looking like a lot of the girls of our current generation strive to look. She's just a natural looking girl. She's got a sweet charm about her, these light blue eyes. She's fair skinned and freckled. And the thing about her girl is this girl was feisty, very imaginative, and creative. Her friend said that she was always the last one to wait for someone if they were going somewhere. She would wait if someone was kind of struggling behind or straggling

4:27 behind, and she would wait for them to catch up. She helped people with homework, ultimate kindness. That is what you hear from her girlfriends when they describe her. Now, another thing I thought this was kind of sweet was her friend said that she sounded just like her mother. And so when my daughter sometimes when my mom will call my daughter or she'll go Kelly, and she'll say, no, it's not Kelly, it's me. And so to sound like your mother, I don't know. I found that to be kind of sweet and a compliment. But she sounded like her mama. But she wanted to follow in her father's footsteps. She kind of liked that engineering path, so she didn't want to go to a state college either. This girl wanted to travel. She loved to travel. She wanted to go as far away as she could. I actually have a student right now. She's making me think of a former student'spen years. But she's traveling all over the world with her mama. Miss Nissum, if you're listening to me, I'm talking about y'all. But this young Sarah, she wanted to be a museum curator or an engineer. Like I said, she kind of wanted to be in the arts, but she liked to build and tinker as well. An honor student, howlujah, her parents were proud, right, an honor student and a proud member of the drill team at Federal Way High School. The Eagles, right go Eagles, and that was their school mascot. Now.

5:40 I looked up the school because I was curious, what kind of school is it? And it looked great. Just the website today. Obviously they didn't have one when this was going on, because this is going to be a while. This happened years ago, but it took up until recently to get it to get it solved. But at this school, forty two languages are spoken between all the almost said inmate, y'all, it's not inmates. At students. Forty two languages were spoken amongst the students. There ninety percent graduation rate and the average teacher has thirteen years experience, So it seems like it's a pretty solid school with a good culture to work at. And Sarah came from a great family who loved her immensely. Her parents were Laura and Tom Yarborough, and they were very involved in their children's lives because there was three of them. Now there was Sarah and then she had two other brothers.

6:28 So something we all worry about as parents is the safety of our kids, especially when we have to be somewhere for one child and there's other responsibilities. You're still responsible for other children and you're, you know, kind of being split in different directions. But since Sarah was the oldest, she was allowed to stay home alone, even though it did leave her mother quite anxious. So this wasn't a common thing. Okay, Sarah wasn't always home alone or anything, but in this situation, her brother had a soccer team game, and so this would have caused their parents to have to go out of town for this game. So the situation was simple. Sarah was gonna stay home, have a friend over so she wasn't by herself, and then her parents were going to be back the next day. Now this is almost foreshadowing at its finest, but on Friday, December thirteenth, that's right, Friday the thirteenth, and this is in nineteen ninety one, Sarah's younger brother Andrew had that soccer game. So her mama, Laura was genuinely fretting and nervous about Oh my god, I don't want to leave you here. It kind of makes me nervous. And Sarah was like, Mama, don't worry. Okay, you're you're being overly protective. Okay, I'm gonna be fine. She kind of teased her mom a little bit like, look, Mama, I can handle it. I'm not gonna get killed. I mean, calm down right, I'm gonna be careful. I'll lock the doors I'm sixteen years old.

7:47 My friend's gonna be here with me. It's not like I'm all by myself. I'm gonna use the family's car. And school is just a couple of blocks from the house, like I think it was two blocks from the house, So it's not like I'm traveling the country. Calm down, mom. So Laura believed that her daughter was responsible and she was sensible, and so there was no problem. You're right, I need to you know, let you spread your wings. You're sixteen. Just check in with us. I love you. Please be careful. There's food in the fridge, and if you need anything, you know, you can contact you know, our friends and family. This is before cell phones. And then her brother Andrew, and both of her parents headed out for Ocean shores to go handle up on some soccer. And everything was fine, just like Sarah said it would be. There were no problems. Her friend Shannon came over, they went to a basketball game. Then they did like most teens do. They ran by the store, they got some junk food, and then they went home and they settled in for the night. No risky behaviors, nothing that would be considered dangerous or out of the norm. The night came and went.

8:54 Everything was good. Saturday morning, though, Sarah awoke in a pan an absolute panic, but not because of an intruder or something. No one was breaking in the house, but because she was late for her drill team practice, so she rushed to get dressed. She even left her hot rollers in her ponytail that were still in her ponytail when she left the house. She had thrown on her drill team uniform. It was a blue and white early nineties cheerleading looking uniform, but it had her name monogrammed right there on the bib. And she poured herself a large cup of orange juice for the road, and she jumped in the car and she headed out to the school for practice. But much to her surprise, when she got there, she was like, oh my god, I'm late. But it turns out she got there a little after eight am, but she was actually really early because they weren't scheduled to meet for about another hour. So hey, happy accident, right, So that was no problem. I'm early, Thank goodness. I can relax, I can drink my juice, and I can finish getting ready in the car, getting my hot curlers out and do whatever it is I want to do. About the same time that Sarah was sitting in her car, thirteen year old Drew Miller and a friend of his who had spent the night, had just finished watching cartoons and eating their cereal, and so they got all bundled up because it was freezing, remember it was really cold at this time of the year, and they went outside to play with each other do whatever thirteen year old boys do. That included cutting through the school property like they always did to get from point A to point B. And so, being typical thirteen year old boys, they noticed that the puddles along the

10:26 way were frozen, and so they decided they wanted to smash the ice. It was fun to watch it shatter and break. Why not break some shit, you know, I'm remember being young, it's fun. Let's make it shatter. Now today, if you look at the school, there's a baseball field in the area that I'm talking about. But in nineteen ninety one, there were really tall bushes near where the boys were smashing the ice. So while they're laughing and they're entertaining themselves and they're walking about and having fun, they look up and they stop. While they see a man come out of those bushes, and it just seemed odd that he came out of that area where there wasn't like anything, it just bushes. So they stopped and they just kind of looked at the guy, like, who are you? So they stopped dead in their tracks, and it just wasn't a normal interaction, you know, like if you accidentally spook somebody and you walk out, you kind of like do the nod ooh, hey, how are you? You know, trying to ease their I guess surprise, But that's not what happened here. The boys said, it was freaking scary. The look he gave them was just everything within their natural being said, this is not good.

11:31 So the man walked out finished walking out of the bushes very calmly. So the boys waited a little bit before they continued on behind the man. They just kind of let him, you know, walk up ahead of them. Fricking weirdo, that's what they were thinking to each other, and it was like, h we don't wan anything to do with this. So a few minutes later, the boys are still kind of hanging around when they walk near those bushes where the man was standing, and they were stunned that they saw a body lay right where that man had just walked out of Clearly there had been a fight. Just looking at her, they could see that there were injuries to her face, her legs were all scratched up and dirty, as if she'd been kicking and clawing and screaming trying to get away from this man.

12:15 But she had not won the fight. And the boys were in shock. They're thirteen. They didn't know what to do. They were scared out of their minds. So they took off running, and they ran all the way back to the house, and they got a hold of their parents and then called the police, realizing that the man that they believed was likely responsible for that girl's death was the one that came out and was staring at them before he turned and he walked off. So the police arrived and they taped off the scene. You know, who is this body? So they're looking her over, and she was obviously a teen girl, and they believed her to be named Sarah because that was the name monogrammed right there on her uniform.

12:56 The police immediately to tell that she had been strangled to death right there on the campus of Federal Way High school. The motive seemed pretty obvious too, because she was partially dressed. Her own nylon stockings were around her neck tied as a ligature. Her body was only three hundred feet away from the car, her car that was parked right there in the school parking lot. So Detective Scott Strathei of the King County Sheriff's Office was the first one on the scene, and he even said that this was a tough scene even for an experienced investigator. She was so innocent, looking in her uniform, a school uniform, and he was looking at her laying there. She still had the hot curlers in her hair. She never even got the chance to take those out. And from the start detective. The detective looked at her and said, this has got to be a sexually motivated crime. I don't can't see it any other way. Her jacket, her un to wear, and her brawl had all been removed and were in a pile next to her where she lay. So they identified the car as Sarah's and they saw it there just about three hundred feet away from where her body was. And when they were looking through the car, there was no struggle in the car and they believed this because even her cup of orange juice was still sitting undisturbed right there in the center of the car. It when, like, you know, they fought and thrashed back and forth. So the police had this working theory at that time that this young girl had somehow been coaxed away from the car

14:30 to follow him, But they weren't sure what it would have been to make her follow this guy, you know, Is it because she was sweet and kind and helpful and maybe he needed help for something and then it ended up in her demise or what exactly could it be? There were no cameras back then. This was their working theory. While Sarah lay dead at the school, officers swarming her naked body looking for clues, her parents and her brother were completely unaware and enjoying Andrew's soccer game. Mid cheer right, They're like, yeah, go Andrew, mid cheer. They noticed a police officer walking around on the sidelines talking to people asking for someone named Yarborough, and so they announced, that's us, that's us. What do you need Can we help you with something? And all the officer would say to them was you need to call home. And this was the era before cell phones, so they had to go get one. They have knots in their stomach and Tom, her dad, finally got a hold of his mother in law, Carol Homequist, who said to them, you've got to come home, and you've got to come home now. What is going on? Can you tell us what's going on? And then the scariest words were then said, Yes, Sarah's missing. We can't find her. She never showed up to practice.

15:46 Her friends called, they're worried about her. Please come home. And so her parents did, like all of us would do. They jumped in their car and they drove as fast as they could one hundred and seven miles to get home, which I'm sure felt like one hundred and seven thousand miles. The whole time, they're wondering where could Sarah be. Oh my god, what if she's hurt? Is she scared? Please God, please let her be okay. So when they got back in town, they ended up going to a friend's house to avoid the media, who had already gotten wind of the breaking case, and they were surprised that when they went inside there was already a police detective waiting there for them, and her mom's gut instincts were telling her this was more than just missing, just reading the room and seeing their faces, and she kept asking, where is my Sarah? Where is she? What's the last thing you know about her? And then the words no one ever wants to hear came out of his mouth and he said, I'm sorry, Sarah is not missing. Sarah is dead. So the wind was kicked out of their lungs, and as the parents collapsed into each other hearing what just couldn't be true, the detective says, Listen, I know this is a lot. I know you're taking on a lot right now, and I'm so sorry, but I really think you need to call her brother Andrew. And you know he's still with his soccer team out in Ocean shores playing. You need to call him. And you know, while this is excruciating in this moment, I think it's best that he hear it from you and not from television, because this is about to make the media. Sarah's

17:19 other brother, Micah, he was only fourteen at the time he heard, and he just went outside to absorb the shock alone. He was so overwhelmed by what had happened, and Sarah's mom unable to stand, she remained seated on the couch, and all she kept screaming was not Sarah, not Sarah, not my Sarah. It can't be Sarah. And that guilt immediately was filling her because she's like, oh my god, I left her alone. I should have never left her alone. I knew I shouldn't have done it. And the detective said something to her that I thought was so kind and so almost perfect in that moment, and she remembered it. He told her, don't you dare blame yourself for what has happened to your daughter. You did nothing wrong. The person who took her life from her did everything wrong.

18:11 This is not your fault. And I'm sure that, as her mother, you're still feeling so much remorse. But he was right. Sarah was doing what she was supposed to do. Y'all were being good parents and doing what you were supposed to be doing. A bad person took the life from your daughter. So as friends and family were having the news broken to them, the police got back to the task of Look, we've got to find this killer. He's dangerous and obviously he's willing to kill. One great thing, at least scientifically speaking, was that male DNA was found under Sarah's fingernails. It was like a reminder of how hard this girl fought for her life. She did not go down without a fight, and before she died by being strangled to death, she was unable to breathe no matter how hard she fought. But the girl fought. So there was a full genetic DNA profile detected from her under her fingernails. The problem was that it was just not the technology was not there in this early nineties. This was not going to give the you know, today we'd be able to do a lot more with it than they were in the early nineties. But something else to note was that Sarah had not been raped, which blew my mind. I really would have thought this would have been a full on rape. This didn't mean that the killer didn't just kill her, you know. This doesn't mean the killer didn't kill her just for the fun of it though, because semen was found it was in her underwear and it was on her jacket that lay beside her, So this was definitely a sexually motivated event that went down. So the

19:47 boys that originally found her body were contacted and they were like, look, guys, can y'all give us anything? Any description of the guy that you saw. And these kids ended up being excellent eyewitnesses. Remember it freaked him out. They stare this guy and they knew and their gut something was wrong. That gut instinct we all have is amazing. So they said sure. He was a white man. He was about six feet tall. He had a medium build. His hair was a little bit longer, it was almost in like a mullet cut, and he had bangs, kind of like a hippie looking guy. I guess. I don't know if y'all are on TikTok like I am, but there's this guy that's kind of blown up and he's older and he like dances and he looks at the camera all seductively. He's real skinny, and he's like dancing and like, you know, trying to, like, I don't know, do a thirst trap or something. The sketch of this guy reminds me so much of thirst trap. TikTok guy.

20:37 I'm gonna have to post this. I'm gonna make a note. I'm gonna post this on Facebook for y'all, so if you want to know what I'm talking about, I'm gonna nail it. I'm gonna show you because it's kind of interesting. But these kids worked really hard with the police to create this drawing, and then the drawing was then turned over and made into a much more elaborate sketch, which I also will post so that you can see that elaborate sketch. But it is bang. I mean, it's great. It doesn't look like these sometimes these random generic looking sketches. This looks like a person that was very clearly seen and there was so much evidence, it seemed like at this scene. But you know, after the initial investigation went on, it was kind of like a nameless face of a monster that had been shared with community, and they had the DNA profile that science couldn't really do much with at the time, and so time just kept passing. About a year and a half later, in June of nineteen ninety three, her murder still wasn't solved. They didn't even really have a good suspect, and Sarah was honored at her school. They unveiled a bench in her honor and in her memory. It has carp a DM right sees the day inscribed on it, and it also had some other things that meant so much to Sarah Ballet shoes, there was a replica of her dog on there, there were books and it's all in bronze on the bench. And later on I found out that that dog, her beloved dog, would outlive her by seven years.

22:04 Thought that was kind of kind of sad. But the drawing of the suspect's face all over town was a constant reminder, not only to the parents but to her brothers of the heartbreak that they were enduring. The rest of us who didn't know her, it's just, oh, yeah, that was a pretty serious case. I remember that. But to the family that had to see this over and over again and know that a killer was walking amongst them, it's a lot. You know, you can't forget that there's still survivors of this crime that are having to deal with a daily And the parents said, looking back, you know, they were probably struggling at parenting at that point, and they didn't realize that they weren't doing a good job as far as helping their sons through the greeting process. But they were like, hell, we were grieving. We didn't know what to do. It's hard for all of us. We don't know what to say. And Sarah's mom didn't even like going to the store because she said that workers would recognize her name and they'd be like, man, I can't play, said I know your name from somewhere, and then she'd feel compelled to have to explain to them, oh, you know, that was my daughter that was killed and they haven't solved it. And then she said, then I'd feel overwhelmed by the feeling that I was making people sad wherever I went. It wasn't on purpose, but it was just this never ending sadness. And even Sarah's brother Micah, had a similar experience, saying that he went to go rent a movie.

23:23 Remember back in the gap when he would go to Blockbuster and run a movie, But he said, you know, I went to go rent a movie and when the clerk saw his name, she said, ugh, I hate that name. And Micah was kind of drawn back and looked at her and said why and she said it was that girl's name and it creeps me out. And Michael looked at her and said, well, that girl was my sister. And the clerk of course apologized, but it just didn't go away, and even more sadness followed. Shannon, her best friend that had stayed with her the night before. She was suffering with survivor's guilt, saying, oh my god, if I just would have went with her, or if I had done something different, maybe she'd be here today. But time continued on, and eventually, what would have been Sarah's graduation from high school, which was on June twelfth, nineteen ninety three, it came and it went, and ironically that also would have been her birthday. Sarah would have graduated on her birthday, and the testament of a strong mother. I wanted to tell y' all this, the testament of a strong mother. Sarah's mom went to that graduation to help support Sarah's friends, to let those girls know, Hey, I support you, and while my daughter should be here and she's not, I still want my presence known. We're dealing with that locally.

24:36 Actually, right now, we have a young girl that went to a local high school and was killed by a two time drunk driver, and they honored her, you know, with a basically an empty chair at the high school. And you can't overlook it, you know, you just can't overlook it. She was a top student, this girl, and she should have been having the time of her life. Instead, she's dead. Same with Sarah, and life went on. Her family though, was still stuck. They didn't move on, They just moved forward. But there's a difference. So, during the years of investigation done into Sarah's killing, King County Sheriff's detectives sent DNA samples of over one hundred men to this State Patrol crime lab to be tested against that unknown male DNA, but they never got a match.

25:22 Every single sample they sent was eliminated as a possible suspect. This means this is really sad. But this murder of this young teenage girl who is just now starting to spread her wings, this would go unsolved for twenty eight years. Can you imagine twenty eight years of not knowing who did this to your daughter or your sister. Well, in the early two thousands, at this point there were over three thousand leads that they had followed up on, and cotis right. Our DNA database was now a thing, and they kept hoping for a match when they put the DNA in there, but there was nothing. But no one in law enforcement believed that this was a one and done killer. Nobody nobody is a one and done. If anything, they escalate so maybe he's locked up, maybe he's dead. We don't know, but there's no way that this is a one and done but time and advancements in technology eventually paid off. This is where we're going to insert a woman by the name of Colleen Fitzpatrick. She does genetic genealogy, which in the early two thousands was in its infancy. Although it's a lot better known now, but back then in two thousand, it was kind of a newer thing.

26:42 So what is genetic genealogy? By the way, if you've never looked this up, I wanted to kind of give you a basic little bit about it. Genetic genealogy basically creates a family history profile and they look at biological relationships between individules. So if we have a DNA sequence like in Sarah's murder, maybe we can find relatives through this genetic genealogy and then we can find the guy we're looking for biologically. So whenever Colleen came about, she came to the police and said, look, I will do this for free. I'm offering my services for absolutely for free, And the police were actually really excited to use it. While a lot of people scoffed at the idea.

27:27 I mean, damn, over twenty years had passed. We got to do something. We've got to try to do whatever we can. And soon, guess what, they had a suspect based off of what Colleen told them. Now, this suspect's name was Robert Fuller. Robert Fuller's family. She could trace it all the way back to the Mayflower. Okay, this shit is legit. I believe in this. I've been to conferences with this, and I believe in the magic of genetic genealogy. Well, whenever the Colleen said Robert Fuller, that name rang a bell because guess what, Robert Fuller was a very close family friend of Sarah's and so he even if you look at video of them when they were given the bench or dedicating the bench in her honor, he's actually the one that pulls the sheet off the bench. And it's like, whoa right, and I know what we're all doing. Now, Well there's the killer. No, Hilaria, we're only a few minutes into this, you know that ain't the killer. Hold On, he was forty eight years old at the time of her murder, which would have been much older than what the guy was that those kids at id'd. They were like, no, he's in his twenties. This was a much younger guy.

28:37 Well, Robert Fuller completely cooperated, said, here take my DNA. I didn't hurt her. I loved her. And guess what, he was right, it was not a match. That DNA was not a match. But what that genetic genealogist knew was that for certain this killer was in his family tree somewhere they were related some more years past. And I know y'all are familiar with this. The Golden State Killer was idd through this method, right through this genetic genealogy. And so those that were trying to say it's a junk science kind of losing that battle because it's working or able to id these people. So Edward and Patrick Nicholas were identified as distant cousins of Bill Fuller, and they started to be looked at very closely because Edward Nicholas was none other than a sex offender. Hmm. So they got his DNA, but guess what, it was not a match. So what was Edward about?

29:41 Though? I wanted to tell you because I was like, well, what did he do? Right? So I did look up his history in a nutshell'm to give it to you. In January of nineteen eighty one, there was a woman, a victim just identified as Miss S. Miss S was awakened by an intruder in her house and she only saw him briefly. It it was nighttime and he was wearing a sweatshirt with a hood over his head, but it was really dark, so she never got to see his face, and he proceeded to have forcible intercourse with her. He raped her viciously, and at one point during the rape she almost thought it was him. She did say the words is it Peter, which she was referring to him, but called in Peter, who lived nearby and had done yard work for her the previous summer. Well, the rapist never responded to her question, but he did jump up and flee from the scene. So she called the police and reported the rape, and they did an investigation, but they did not develop any suspects. Then are you ready to have your mind blown?

30:42 In June of nineteen eighty one, so that rape was January of nineteen eighty one. In June of nineteen eighty one, Miss S was again raped by an intruder in her home in the middle of the night. Oh my god, So she tried to push him away. She was scratching at his hands, I mean, with her hands at his face and his chest. And again he fled, but she got a much better look at him this time, and she said he is slender but muscular. He's got this short, kind of curly, wavy hair, and she said he smelled like a mix of sweat and cologne. He was wearing two layers of clothing. She said, it was like a T shirt with a shirt over it or a jacket over it. And she said, I don't know why, but I feel like the same guy who broke in and raped me in January is the same guy that did this just now. So they called in a knine.

31:34 This dog's name is k C, which I like just because shout out to my friend canine officer KC. His name is Case's Q's a black lab. But KC, who's a police dog, was able to pick up a scent of the intruder on some bushes, but then he lost it in an intersection. Then he picked it up again across the way. And so the officer, now his name is Kummerfeldt. That's the officer. He ran down the street following the dog into a school yard, a school yard where they found Nicholas hiding. Now I have the maturity of a ten year old boy right now when I say that. Cummerfeldt described Nicholas as extremely sweaty, red faced, and was standing there with a big old erection. He never lost his erection. So whenever I'm sorry, you just rape somebody and then you run off and you get busted by the police and you get taken down by a dog and you have a big old boner, I would think you would lose interest at some point when you're running for your freedom, but not this fella.

32:47 So Officer Hambley is the one who took him into custody, and he said, yup. He was sweating really bad, and he had a big old erection the whole time. He also had some fresh scratches on his face that looked like finger your nails had scratched him. He had dirty tennis shoes and the baggy shirt just like miss s had said. He had no socks on, and he didn't have any drawls. So Nicholas had an explanation for this though. He said, no, no, no, you've got this all wrong. I got these scratches earlier in the day because I was painting a house and I fell off of a ladder, and then I went drinking at a bar, and then I walked to my friend's house and my friend wasn't home, so then I came walking back to my house and I stopped to pee, and that's when the dog ran up on me. And they're like, okay, then why are you so sweaty and why you got a heart on and he goes, oh, yeah, well I was randomly running too. Okay, that's what we call bullshit, right, And so he was charged with one count of first degree rape and one count of first degree burglary, but in both of those cases because they believed he was the same guy. He went to court in January. He was found guilty of the January rape, but the June rape he was found not guilty. Figure that one out. So while he sounded like a great lead, he just didn't match the DNA from Sarah's clothing. But somebody very close to him in that family tree had done this to Sarah, and that's when they looked at his brother. His brother's name was Patrick Nicholas. So Patrick was a divorced loaner.

34:22 He was working at an auto parts store. He didn't have any friends in the area, he didn't have any children. He also didn't have a car, and that was kind of important to the cops because he didn't have a car, which meant he got around by riding a bus. Well, very interesting to police was the fact that the bus route he used went right past Federal Way High School, so he would have been in the area if he was riding the bus. Also interesting is that at the time of Sarah's murder, Patrick would have only been twenty six years old, so he's kind of fitting the profile there. But even more interesting is that if you put his face to that sketch that was made off of the boys that ide'd that guy walking off, it's a dead freaking ringer. It looks just like him.

35:08 This is either a coincidence of the century or those thirteen year old boys had that face emblazoned into their minds. So in September of twenty nineteen, police decided to assign a surveillance team to him and they were going to try to get his DNA without his knowledge, right, So that's totally legal. If you you know, throw your trash out or throw something on the ground, the police can collect it and get the DNA off of it. There's nothing illegal there. So they ended up following him to a laundromat and he smoked some cigarettes and he threw those cigarette butts on the ground as he turned to walk off. He also dropped a napkin out of his pocket, so hashtag don't litter either if you're a bad guy. So the police collected those items, they sent it to the lab, and wouldn't you know, it was a perfect match. The man at the laundromat was the man that the boys had seen twenty six years prior, right there at the scene where Sarah had been strangled and sexually assaulted. He had never been named a suspect before.

36:12 In all of the twenty plus years of this investigation, he was nowhere on the radar. The genetic genealogy was the key to kickstart all of this. So when the information was broken to the family, they were in shock and relief. Right the police had told them twenty something years ago, technology will eventually solve this case. I know that doesn't sound good now, but we're gonna get him. We just aren't there yet technology wise, So the young boy who is now a grown man that found Sarah. You know. He said that face was seared into his mind. And the police brought a photo of Patrick Nicholas and showed it to him, and he had a literal, visceral reaction whenever he saw his face. He said, that's him.

36:57 He may have aged, he may have got older, but those evil eyes haven't changed. This is the guy I saw. Oh my god. So the police brought Patrick in for questioning, and when they directly asked him about his possible involvement in a young girl's death, do you know what his first question to them was. It wasn't what are you talking about? It wasn't do you have the wrong person? Do you know who I am? This wasn't me, Oh my god. No, His first question was what year? Excuse me? What year? How many victims are there? How many people have you how many girls have you killed? What do you mean what year? So his criminal record, when they looked into it, though, it's, said a whole lot about him, including the fact that he was actually on parole at the time of Sarah's murder. Yes, he had been paroled from prison and just before she was murdered, so what about that case that he was paroled? Form from inquiring minds? Want to know? Because I wanted to know, so I'll dug into it. So here it is.

38:12 So back in June of nineteen eighty three, a twenty one year old woman named Anne Crony was sitting in her car at a local hotspot for skiing. And I want you to note this is a whole eight years before Sarah was murdered. Okay. A man approached her and asked her, Hey, have you been out today? Have you been skiing? Because it's popular where she's at And she said, no, I haven't been. Have you been? It's nice out and he said no, I can't swim, I don't ski. She was like, oh, okay. So they did some small talk, they smoked some cigarettes, but then Anne said something came over her and she started to feel really uncomfortable with his presence, again, that gut instinct that I always tell people to listen to, she said. His voice started to become really shaky, and so she decided to distance herself and she got into the car. She went to close the door. As soon as she went to close the door, he put a knife up to her throat.

39:05 He forced her to get undressed, he took her own underwear stuffed it in her throat. He then forced her out of the car, walked her down the river bank. And she's a hero to herself because that's when she looked at the river and said, fuck this guy. He said he can't swim, and she took off running and she just headfirst dove into this river. Well it was true, y'all. He couldn't swim, and she swam for her life to get away from him. She ended up making it, I'm gonna say, across the river, but you know, across the way, and some passers by found her near a dock and they immediately called police. That's when he was nineteen at the time. Nineteen year old Patrick Nicholas was arrested a few days later. And I'd like to mention here also that as a juvenile, so before he made adult age, he had also raped two women and attempted a third. How many times do you get to do this shit to people? It makes you wonder. So in Anne's attempted rape case, he did plead guilty, and he did address the court. I thought i'd read to you what he said direct quote, I realize I do have a problem raping girls. I was gonna force the girl to have sex with me that day in the park, and then I realized it's not right.

40:29 I want help with my problem, do you though, No, no, you weren't. That girl saved her own life. You just couldn't swim. You had no intentions of leaving her alive. I don't believe that as far as I can freaking throw you. So the judge threw the book at him, but at the time she gave him the maximum sentence. But guess what, it was only ten years. Ten years. This guy's got two rapes and attempted rape and now another another assault on another woman. That's four people in ten years. Wow. However, and this is where I start getting really irritated. He only served three and a half years of that ten year sentence. He got released, he was paroled, And and the victim in all of this, who should have every ounce of information for her safety, she put him behind well I'm sorry, he put himself behind bars, but she stood her ground and made sure he went behind bars. She wasn't even notified of his release. Unacceptable. So how could this be? How could he be released after only three and a half years. He's clearly a predator. He's very dangerous. Well, according to prison records, he didn't have any quote, major infractions while he was in prison, and they said, oh, well, he didn't have a drug or alcohol problem. So in one of the evaluations that was done on him, it was written that he quote would be safe to be at large given an ongoing therapeutic relationship and

42:00 parole supervision. I'm sorry the people who wrote that. I hope they're going to let him go move in with their daughter. If you feel like he's that safe, then let him move in with you. Ridiculous. So in nineteen eighty seven, that's when Nicholas was released from prison early, with the understanding that he was going to go to an outpatient sex offender treatment program. But guess what, no one knows if he even went to it. There's no record of whether he even went to it, so that supervision was on point, right, Yeah, Okay, So police obtained a search warrant for his home and that's when they found some interesting stuff in his house. First of all, it was like a dungeon, like a like a slothslayer.

42:40 It was hort esque it was gross and dirty, tons of pornography, including animals that were drawn with human genitalia. There was a newspaper about Sarah's death, and in the kitchen drawer he had a torn magazine page had a photo of a young girl in a cheerleading outfit. Okay, it wasn't Sarah, but you get the point. If he had served the whole sentence from the ann case, he would have never been out. He would have still been behind bars that on the day that Sarah was killed, and this wouldn't have even been a consideration to be dealing with right now. But it was the fact that it was him, it was his DNA. He should have been in prison. The system failed. That's what you hear people say, the system failed. But I'm gonna tell y'all something, No, it didn't.

43:38 There's no system in place. System is a catchphrase. There's no thing that is a system. That's an idea. We are the system. We the people are the system. We need to make sure the people that are parolling these people have a good solid understanding of the people that they're dealing with with. I don't think that they did. I don't think that they understood the gravity of the type of man they were releasing early. Let a drug addict go before a rapist. At least a drug addicts kind of happy hurting themselves leave. They're not raping people. I mean they can. I'm just saying, but there was a there was a very obvious motive with this guy.

44:27 All of the women were approached in their cars, all of them. He made them walk, undressed them, and then raped or attempted to rape them at knife point. It's kind of laying out the story for sweet Sarah and what probably happened to her. Aren't you seeing it now? She didn't go with him because she wanted to. She was scared, and she was doing the only thing she could think to keep herself safe. Three years after Sarah's murder, he sexually assaulted a minor that was a nineteen ninety four Here's the kicker to all of this. None of those cases, because of where they lived, required a DNA submission. Clearly he is a predator, but they didn't require his DNA to be submitted. He was arrested for Sarah's murder and it would head to trial. Even better, though, is when I tell you this, and it really does it infuriates me. I don't care that this has been a murder a long time ago. It doesn't go away.

45:32 Sarah's still dead. We all understand that, right, It's not over. Patrick was convicted in nineteen eighty three of attempted first degree rape in Benton County, Washington. This was before COTIS was ever launched, because that was in the nineties. In nineteen ninety three, he was arrested again for first degree child molestation. So although his DNA profile should have been entered into COTIS, and this is where plea deals get on my nerves, he was allowed to plead down to a misdemeanor, which meant his DNA again would not be submitted into COTIS. So basically, he escaped detection twice when we should have already had his DNA on file. After his arrest, it was discovered that his brother, Edward had already been entered into COTIS for his rape case because he was the registered sex offender. But Washington didn't allow familial searching familial DNA searching, so Patrick had escaped detection a third time. And the argument here was that it was invasion of privacy type thing like a healthcare argument. Really because the DNA on Sarah's body was an invasion of her privacy, just saying and just like in the David Cam case, hopefully you're up to date right now.

46:54 But just like in the David Cam case, you're gonna love this. Some of the information about him wasn't even allowed in the trial, to the tune of his prior rape cases were not allowed because the courts argued it was too prejudicial. That's interesting to me. I know that there's laws to it, and I know there's strategy to this, and they don't want to you know, they don't want to have the same outcome, which is why David Cam walks free today is because of all of that. But David Cam walks free today in my opinion, because they didn't introduce his history. This guy was too prejudicial. Wow, so now he's fifty nine years old, but he's going on trial for that murder all those years ago. And also there was a girl power moment if ever we needed one. The Honorable Josephine Wiggs was on the stand and just to give you kind of an idea of this, Mam, she is a black female judge. She's got her braids, she's up on the stand and she is ready to handle business, okay, and DNA became the main focus of this case. The public defender that he had was named David Montes, I believe how you would say Montes, and he was claiming the whole time that the genetic genealogy was whack and that it's unproven. But it wasn't check this out. They struggled in that genealogy when they were trying to develop it to find the suspect. They were struggling because it was discovered later on that Patrick's paternal grandfather had been adopted by the Nicholas

48:30 family, so that surname Nicholas was not what the initial genetic analysis had predicted. Not because it's whack, but it's because the adoption was unknown. It was actually, if anything, making an even stronger case for these genetics. You know what I'm saying. I thought that was awesome. They were no, it's even stronger case. We were struggling because what we had was right and it wasn't making sense because of an adoption. All the while, Patrick Nicholas during this trial is seated at the bench looking much different than that sketch that you would you be shown his blue sweater vests and his white collared shirt. He has a trimmed goatee, and his hair is geled back, and he's got on glasses, really looking the part of the I don't know what you're talking about, what year, But it was a moot point. The argument about genetics was moot because the DNA did match. The odds, by the way, were one in one hundred and twenty quadrillion that it would be somebody else. That's that's incredible. The sweater, her jacket, her nylon stocking stockings, all over thirty years old were pulled out as evidence before the jury, and they had nine days of testimony, but it took over just a day to get the verdict. Not guilty of first degree premeditated murder.

49:57 But don't be too dismayed because he was found guilty of murder in the first degree and second degree with a sexual motivation. Patrick Leon Nicholas had a sentencing hearing just a few weeks later, and while Anne Crony was not allowed to testify during the trial because remember that would have been too prejudicial, she did speak at the sentencing. Now, miss Anne, and I mean this with all the love in my heart, just to kind of give you description. She's kind of a butch female, absolutely lovely, and she stood her ground once again against this man. And she looked at the courts and she looked at the judge and she said, Sarah went through basically what I went through, but I survived. Please don't make this same mistake again. God bless miss Anne Crony for doing that. She's standing up for Sarah when Sarah couldn't stand up for herself. Sarah's mama even said about her little girl, she was the delight of my life. She was smart and creative. She planted flowers every spring. She helped her younger brothers with homework. She was excited to attend an out of state college. She enjoyed museums and the ballet.

51:07 And she told her mother that she felt alive when she got to dance. That's who was taken from this world. And Judge Wiggs said, I think about this poor child and what she experienced fighting for her life. And she banged her hands on her desk and she said, this was a child. You did this to a child. How many more victims are out there? Who knows what year the familial DNA matched it matched unknown DNA to known DNA of the family, but the State of Washington didn't allow it, and Patrick ran under the radar the whole time. Remember, his brother was already in the system. If they would have just allowed it, Sayah could still be alive today. Patrick Leon Nicholas was sentenced to almost forty six years in prison and is now known as in Mate two seven nine five seven six. And good riddance, my man, see you later. No one's gonna miss you.

52:07 You left your DNA and it caught up with you, and min I suggest putting on a condo, my darling, because if you're gonna act like a dick, you might as well dress like one.