[THEME MUSIC]
16-year-old Sarah Yarborough's is
being remembered as talented, creative, and kind.
Sarah was an A student at the high school.
Whenever you saw Sarah, she always had a smile.
This case is about a 16-year-old girl
who had the right to grow up.
This case is about Sarah and everything
that she should have been allowed to become.
It was Friday the 13th in December of 1991.
Her parents were out of town for her brother's soccer game.
She stayed home.
I was reluctant to leave Sarah.
She didn't want to come, of course, because she had
her whole weekend planned out.
So she had a friend come over and stay with her that weekend.
We went to a basketball game, went and got junk food
at the grocery store, a little bit of fast food.
We're 16.
We were carefree.
There was absolutely nothing that would make any of us
think that the next morning, everything would change.
So Saturday Morning, Sarah woke up in a panic.
She woke up and said, I'm late for practice.
She put on her drill team uniform and ran out the door.
She went to the school and discovered that she was early.
So she parked in her car and waited for the rest of her team
to show up.
Shortly after, the phone calls started.
Where's Sarah?
Do you know where she is?
Sarah was found within an hour.
Where was her body discovered?
So her car was still in the parking lot.
Her body was approximately 100 yards away,
still on the school property.
Part of her clothing was removed.
She had nylon stockings tied in a ligature around her neck.
I just remember saying, "not Sarah, not Sarah, not Sarah,"
over and over again.
The suspect is a white male, 6 feet tall with a medium build--
They had DNA evidence.
They had everything.
They had witnesses.
In that first week or so, it sounded
like they had so much evidence.
For at least a short while, it felt like--
but you said--
Of course they're going to catch him.
--of course they're going to catch him.
And then when they didn't and they didn't, your expectations
change.
You don't know if it's your next-door neighbor.
You don't know if it's some random stranger.
There was that constant fear of, is this going to happen again?
We literally had a monster in the community, and we just--
we didn't know who it was.
[THEME MUSIC]
[SOMBER MUSIC]
How often do you think about December 14
1991 and what happened on that day?
Quite a bit.
It's a very traumatic thing to go through.
It's been over 30 years, but the details of that day
have never faded for Drew Miller.
My friend spent the night at my house.
We woke up that morning, watched cartoons,
ate cereal, left to go skateboarding.
Drew, who was just 13 at the time,
lived down the street from Federal Way High School
near Seattle, Washington.
The school grounds have changed quite a bit, right?
Drastically, yes.
The tennis court's the only thing that's still here.
Drew often took shortcuts through the school
to go skateboarding, as he and his friend did that day.
We used to hop the fence right here and cut through here.
It was freezing cold that day, and there was
ice in all of the mud puddles.
We just started smashing them because it's fun.
It sounds like breaking glass.
That's when Drew says they noticed a man in the bushes.
Right where you see the edge of this dugout right here,
that was all bushes that were probably this tall.
So we couldn't see him until he stood up.
He's just staring at us from the bushes.
That was pretty jarring.
But then he just walked out of the bushes.
So then we just assumed he was just smoking weed or something.
The mysterious man kept to himself
and walked ahead of the boys.
Drew says they didn't think much of it
until they came across a horrendous scene.
There in the bushes where the man had just been
was the body of a young woman.
It was horrible, absolutely horrible.
The way that he left her body, she clearly
fought for her life.
Drew says his shock turned to fear
when he realized the man who was still
just feet in front of them was now
staring directly back at him.
Does that look still haunt you?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
It's frozen in my mind.
The boogeyman then?
Legitimate boogeyman.
The boys raced to Drew's house, and police
were called to the scene.
When we approached the victim, on one
of the pieces of clothing, we saw the name Sarah.
Detective Scott Strathy with the King County Sheriff's Office
was one of the first officers on the scene.
And of course, later we found out that was Sarah Yarborough.
Even for experienced investigators,
this scene was really hard to deal with.
Just the innocent nature of this young woman in her school drill
team uniform, with her hot curlers still in her hair,
this was just pure, unadulterated evil.
Investigators believed this was a sexually motivated murder.
She was partially clothed.
Her jacket, her undergarments, her bra
had been removed and placed next to her body.
Police discovered that the car Sarah
had driven that morning was parked in the school parking
lot, about 300 from where her body was found.
There didn't really appear to be any sort of a struggle
in the car itself.
Detective John Free with the King County Sheriff's Office
Major Crimes Unit would later join the investigation.
She had a container of orange juice
that she had made that morning.
It was just sitting in the front seat.
Nothing was tipped over.
So the question was, how did she get from her car to this hill?
What led her there?
Sarah was one of these people that would help anyone
with anything at any time.
And part of our working theory was, was she coaxed
into following the suspect?
Did he say something like, "I'm looking for my lost dog,"
or "I can't find my car keys"?
Perhaps Sarah, in an attempt to assist this person,
may have followed him to that area.
Tell me about this one.
That was less than a week, I think, before she died, I said,
could I take your picture?
Because your great grandma really wants a picture of you
in your drill team.
And she goes, OK.
It was just too incredible to believe
that it could even happen.
Sarah's parents, Laura and Tom Yarborough.
I mean, who thinks that your daughter
is going to be murdered?
Tom and Laura had the excruciating task
of having to tell their two sons the tragic news.
Sarah's youngest brother Andrew was just
11 years old at the time.
At that age, you've probably never seen
or heard your parents cry much.
But that pain in the voice is very vivid.
Sarah, who had just started her junior year in high school,
had big plans for her future, starting with college.
She didn't want to go to a state school.
She wanted to go to a school far away.
She loved to travel.
I actually would hear her say, I can't
decide if I want to be a museum curator
or an engineer like my father.
And I was always rooting for the museum curator.
Liberty Barnes, Kristi Gutierrez, Amy Parodi,
and Mary Beth Thome were some of Sarah's closest friends.
So this was after the last day of 10th grade.
And we're just kind of goofing around afterwards.
And that totally, I mean, you can
see there's Sarah right in the middle of it, just being goofy.
[SOMBER MUSIC]
The fiery red hair, was that her personality?
Yes.
Yeah.
She was artistic.
She was creative.
She was smart.
She was feisty.
Imaginative.
All of those things.
She would be the last one to wait for someone,
always be there with a smile.
She would help with homework.
It was her ultimate kindness.
After Sarah was ripped from their lives,
they say their sense of safety was gone forever.
You grow up getting all the safety conversations
with your parents.
And bad things can happen.
And it's all this sort of vague possibility out there.
And then all of a sudden, it was like, no, no, no, no, no, it
can really happen.
It really did just happen.
[EERIE MUSIC]
It was all hands on deck.
The sheriff's office put everything they had
into solving this case as soon as they could.
And the killer left behind important evidence.
Sarah had not been raped, but the killer's DNA
was found on pieces of her clothing.
There was semen found on her underwear and on her jacket.
We had a full male DNA profile.
DNA technology was new back in 1991.
But investigators hoped that DNA would someday
lead them to Sarah's killer.
In the meantime, they had eyewitnesses.
I thought for sure somebody would know him.
Drew and his friend who was with him the morning
they found Sarah's body worked with police,
and a sketch of the man they saw in the bushes
was released to the public.
Police would later release a more elaborate sketch.
I very vividly remember going through yearbooks, going, OK,
who looks like this sketch?
Everyone, it felt like, at one point, was a suspect.
But as days went by and as leads dried up,
police kept coming back to Drew and his friend.
They just made me feel like I was the only person that
could help them solve this.
I know that wasn't the intent.
The officers are just doing their best.
How much pressure were you feeling?
It's unimaginable pressure.
And despite everyone's best efforts,
it would take years to find Sarah's killer.
This case was never forgotten.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[SOMBER MUSIC]
In early June of 1993, 1 and 1/2 years after Sarah Yarborough's
murder, local media were there as students
gathered in the courtyard of Federal Way High School
to honor her.
Bill Fuller, a family friend who helped spearhead the move
for a memorial to remember Sarah,
unveiled it with help from Sarah's younger brother Andrew.
It was quite a day, a lot of tears as they looked at it.
You could see Sarah in that bench.
Bill Fuller has known the Yarboroughs for years,
and his daughter was in Sarah's class.
Sarah was fun to be around.
That was probably what we missed the most,
is she was fun to be around.
The bench reads "carpe diem," seize the day,
a mantra Sarah lived by.
Encased in bronze are some of her favorite possessions--
ballet shoes, a replica of Sarah's beloved dog Gibby,
and books.
It's nice that people cared about her so much,
Andrew Yarborough, now an adult, admits that he
struggled as a young teenager.
It was especially difficult to see those sketches
around town of the man police believed murdered his sister.
There was drawings of the person's face
all over in businesses and town.
I do recall that quite a bit, just having that kind
of a constant reminder.
Looking back.
I feel like we didn't do a very good job with the boys.
I think that we were so consumed by our own grief
that we didn't take time to help them.
I think we didn't really know how to help them.
I mean, it wasn't something we had experience with.
We didn't know anything about grieving ourselves
or how to help them through it.
And they weren't alone in their grief.
Shannon Grant, the last friend to see Sarah alive,
says she lived with constant regret.
I wish we could go back and do it all over again, that I would
have asked the other drill team members what time practice was,
maybe dropped her off.
I mean, there's a lot of the what-ifs.
The milestones were especially painful.
There was survivor guilt. Why am I
filling out my college applications when
Sarah wanted to go to college?
This isn't fair.
Every joyful occasion had this sorrow
that went with it that was--
there's one missing from the crowd here.
Graduation day, June 12, 1993 was an emotional day
but even more so since it fell on what would have
been Sarah's 18th birthday.
Laura Yarborough came to support her daughter's friends.
I do not know where she found the strength to do that.
She loved that green dress, right?
Yeah.
She wore green quite a bit with her hair.
Laura Yarborough says Sarah's friends
helped ease her grief somewhat.
And she thinks she filled the void for them as well.
Sometimes they would say, well, I'm going to date this person,
and I just wanted to let you know because I wasn't sure
if Sarah would approve of this person.
So they would seek approval through you.
You became sort of their surrogate.
[LAUGHS] Yes.
As life slowly moved forward, investigators
kept working the case.
I describe it as like a relay race
where the baton was handed off from one detective
to the next over the years and decades.
I kind of refer to myself as the fifth Beatle
in this investigation.
By the early 2000s, investigators
had received over 3,000 leads, and advances in technology
made them hopeful.
They entered the DNA from the crime scene
into the recently established CODIS system, a national DNA
database that includes profiles of convicted offenders.
The strategy was to continually try
to see if there would ever be a match while also investigating
leads.
But over time, there appeared to be no match.
For us to have DNA evidence from the suspect
but not have that link to anybody,
it just didn't make sense.
It seemed hard to believe that the suspect hadn't committed
any other prior crimes where his DNA wouldn't be in the system.
That's when he says detectives realized they had
to go in a different direction.
My name's Colleen Fitzpatrick, and I'm
one of the pioneers of forensic genetic genealogy.
In 2011, investigators reached out to Fitzpatrick
to inquire about using forensic genetic genealogy,
the practice of using software to compare unknown DNA
profiles to information from public DNA databases
and searching family trees to identify suspects.
Genetic genealogy is well known now
and has been used to solve numerous cold cases.
But at that time, it was in its infancy.
When I started in this field, it didn't exist.
Fitzpatrick says most police agencies had been skeptical
of this new investigative tool.
The police thought I was crazy, this little old lady
with a crazy idea.
And I was actually almost laughed out of the room.
But the King County Sheriff's Office
took a chance on Fitzpatrick.
It was for free.
I just wanted to see if it worked.
What are you going to lose if you try something?
The Yarboroughs were encouraged.
I think it wasn't until we met Colleen Fitzpatrick that I
really began to think, well, they're
going to find this person.
And it didn't take long before Fitzpatrick came up
with the name of a possible suspect that surprised just
about everyone.
Everyone went, [SCOFFS] no way.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
From the beginning, it was very promising.
And the story took some really bizarre twists.
In 2011, 20 years after Sarah's murder,
when forensic genetic genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick
started working the Yarborough case,
she traced Sarah's killer's family tree
back to a man named Robert Fuller, whose family had come
to America on the Mayflower.
I found numerous matches to the name Fuller.
When Fitzpatrick gave the name Fuller to the King County
Sheriff's Office, they immediately knew of one person
with that last name--
Bill Fuller, the Yarboroughs' close family friend who helped
get that memorial bench built for Sarah.
Naturally, that piqued our interest.
From the beginning, Sarah's family and friends
believed Bill Fuller had nothing to do with Sarah's murder.
He didn't look at all like the suspect, the wrong hair color.
He's short.
He's not tall.
He just didn't fit the profile at all.
Fuller's age didn't match the profile either.
He's 79 years old now but was 48 years old
at the time of Sarah's murder, at least two decades older
than the man Drew Miller described.
There was no way that I could be even remotely connected
to the case.
He fully cooperated with police and voluntarily
gave them a DNA sample.
It didn't match the DNA found at Sarah's crime scene,
yet Fitzpatrick remained optimistic.
The good news is that we came up with a possible last name
to investigate.
And this was the first break in the case in 20 years.
Fitzpatrick knew that Sarah's killer was in the Fuller family
tree somewhere, so she and her team went back to work.
And as the years went by, she knew
she was only getting closer, especially after 2018,
when forensic genetic genealogy was used to identify the Golden
State Killer.
The Golden State Killer really started the big revolution.
Things had evolved, that we had the data to work with.
The technology was in place that we could go for it.
Then, in September of 2019, Fitzpatrick's team
made a breakthrough.
They came up with two new possible suspects--
brothers Edward and Patrick Nicholas,
who, as the DNA showed, were distant cousins of Bill Fuller.
This is eight years of on and off and looking at it,
never giving up.
This is it.
This is exciting.
Edward Nicholas was a registered sex offender.
His DNA was in the system, was in CODIS.
But Edward's DNA wasn't a match.
So they zeroed in on his brother Patrick,
who, in 2019, was a divorced loner who
lived a couple of towns away from Federal Way.
We learned that he was working at a auto parts store, lived
alone, no children, no friends or acquaintances
that would even visit him.
Everything that he did was mostly by bus.
He wasn't driving.
Detective Free says he discovered
that when Sarah was murdered, the bus route Nicholas often
took happened to go past Federal Way High School.
Back then, Nicholas was just 27 years old
and around that time looked very much like the description
of the sketch.
It looked promising at that point,
but we still needed to get a DNA sample from him
to match up to the DNA evidence that we had.
So in late September 2019, investigators
came up with a plan.
We assigned a team of undercover detectives
to start doing surveillance on Patrick
Nicholas in the hopes of obtaining a surreptitious DNA
sample.
Eventually, undercover detectives
followed Nicholas to a laundromat.
They saw him go outside and smoke a cigarette.
And Patrick Nicholas was seen throwing the cigarette butt
on the ground.
That was collected by our detectives.
That's what you needed.
Yes.
Right there, that cigarette butt.
Yes.
Actually, he dropped two cigarette butts and a napkin
that fell out of his pocket.
And all three items were collected.
The DNA samples were rushed to the crime lab.
And within days, detectives received the call
they had been waiting for.
The DNA match.
This was our suspect.
Perfect match?
Yes.
Patrick Nicholas was arrested.
There were so many suspects over the years.
Was Patrick Leon Nicholas ever named as a suspect?
Out of 4,000 tips, he was never named.
I was pretty in shock.
The news was a relief for Sarah's family and friends,
who had never given up hope that they would get answers.
One thing the detectives kept telling us was,
eventually, technology is going to solve this case.
I trusted that.
And they turned out that they were right.
And I remember going out to my car and bawling, just bawling.
Finally, finally, they got him.
When Drew Miller, who had seen Sarah's killer back in 1991,
saw Patrick Nicholas's face, he says
he knew they had the right person.
What did he look like?
The same guy, just older, just the same evil eyes.
Same face?
Those evil eyes stayed the same.
All these years later?
Yeah.
But it was not over yet.
Why do you think you're here?
I have no clue.
During his interrogation--
What am I being charged for?
--when detectives specifically asked him about Sarah's murder,
he gave an alarming response.
What we're investigating is the death
of a young girl named Sarah Yarborough.
What year?
Interestingly, he asked what year this was.
And that really sent up a flag.
Why?
Why would you ask that?
He's being told this is a murder case.
We're wondering at this point, are there other victims?
This is it.
I'm not going to say anything--
After 1 and 1/2 hours, Nicholas asked for an attorney
and stopped talking.
But his criminal record would speak volumes.
I am the one that got away.
[EERIE MUSIC]
On a quiet morning in June 1983, eight years
before Sarah's murder, 21-year-old Anne Croney
was sitting by her car along the Columbia
River in Richland, Washington when a man approached her.
He seemed normal, kind of friendly
actually, just friendly.
I had asked him if he'd done any water skiing yet because he
said he had just moved to town.
And he said he couldn't swim.
And he said, my name is Pat Nicholas.
After a few minutes of small talk, she became uncomfortable.
I noticed his voice was getting shaky.
And I told him I had to go.
I went to close the door, and he put a knife to my throat.
Everything kind of stopped at that moment.
He told me to take my clothes off.
Nicholas stuffed Anne's underwear into her mouth
to prevent her from screaming, forced her out of the car,
and led her to the riverbank.
We got about halfway down the bank, and he told me to stop.
I ran and dove in the river because I
was thinking he couldn't swim, swam as hard as I could.
You swam for your life.
I swam for my life.
Passersby found Anne at a dock nearby and called police.
As it turns out, 19-year-old Patrick Nicholas
was no stranger to law enforcement and had a record.
He had raped two women and attempted to rape a third.
He'd been convicted of rape as a juvenile
and had actually only just been out for a few months
when he attacked me.
Days after Anne's attack, he was tracked down, arrested,
and pled guilty to attempted rape.
He told authorities, "I realize that I
have a problem concerning raping girls."
At his sentencing hearing, Anne spoke out.
I was actually very angry and asked the judge
for the maximum sentence.
And the judge did agree and sentenced him to 10 years.
So I thought it was over.
I thought that justice had been served.
But Patrick Nicholas did not serve
the full 10 years in prison.
He was released after just 3 and 1/2 years.
Anne was never notified.
She barely thought of him again until October 2019.
The police knocked on my door and said
that there were detectives in Seattle that
wanted to talk to me about a cold case.
They informed Anne that Patrick Nicholas had
been arrested again, this time for the murder of Sarah
Yarborough.
He told me that there were similarities in the cases.
And I was crushed.
It had never occurred to me that what I escaped from
was a murderer.
What's more, if Nicholas had served his full prison
sentence, he would have still been behind bars
that December morning in 1991, unable to murder Sarah
Yarborough.
How angry are you to hear that he
was released that early and--
Very.
It brought up a lot of the old anger and even more anger,
because the system failed.
King County deputy prosecuting attorney Celia Lee and Mary
Barbosa describe him as a serial predator with a clear pattern.
All of the women were approached at or near their car.
He would strike up a conversation
and then pull a knife and tell them that they needed to walk,
where he would order them to take off their clothes and then
rape them.
Nicholas had also been convicted of sexually
assaulting a minor in 1994, three years after Sarah's
murder.
Five sexual assaults that investigators knew of,
none of which had required him to submit his DNA,
so there was no record of him in the CODIS database.
But in pretrial hearings, the judge
ruled that Nicholas's criminal history could not
be entered in as evidence.
She found that it would be unfairly
prejudicial to the defendant.
But the prosecutors were hopeful their case was strong enough.
All rise for the jury.
In early 2023, more than 30 years after Sarah Yarborough's
murder, her accused killer, now 59 years old, went on trial.
Sarah's childhood friends were there.
I so clearly remember the morning
before the trial started just going,
I don't know if I can do this.
I had so many different emotions flowing through.
And it was like, no, we need to be there.
There was this absolute love for Sarah and the Yarboroughs
that was so strong.
Did you feel like they were a lifeline for you?
Yeah.
Be seated.
You weren't in it alone.
You were all in it together.
As the trial got underway, the focus was on the DNA.
What was your strategy then in trying this case?
Well, we needed them to trust the science.
There was a field that was emerging called
forensic genetic genealogy.
Patrick Nicholas's public defender, David Montes,
challenged how forensic genetic genealogy was used
to first identify Nicholas.
I want to dig into the science because--
The first time that kind of defense
had been used in Washington State.
They used technology that was not only proven,
but just wacky, really.
He's not the person that killed Sarah Yarborough.
The police needed an answer more than they
need the right answer.
And so they turned to new, novel, untested technology.
Genetic genealogy is a new field.
It really hasn't been tested out.
Should we be making important decisions
based on something that is not well or deeply understood?
But the prosecutors said that argument was moot
because Patrick Nicholas's DNA matched the DNA found
at the Yarborough crime scene.
And Detective Free says the numbers were astronomical.
The odds were 1 in 120 quadrillion that--
Quadrillion, yeah.
Right, that it was somebody else.
If the numbers pointed to Nicholas's guilt,
law enforcement says so did evidence
found at his house near the time of his arrest in 2019.
It was almost like a lair.
There was no working electricity at this house,
stacks of pornography all throughout the place.
We also found a newspaper from 1994 that had on its front page
an article about the Sarah Yarborough case.
And going through one of the kitchen drawers,
we found a torn photograph taken from a magazine, a woman
in a cheerleading outfit.
When the prosecutors showed that photo in the courtroom,
the oxygen left the room.
Yeah.
Montes downplayed their significance.
I think both of those pieces of evidence
were not especially strange given
the general state of his house.
There were stacks and stacks of newspapers all over his house.
This is evidence tape.
Patrick Nicholas didn't flinch as the evidence
was shown, showing no emotion throughout the trial.
But Sarah Yarboroughs presence was felt, especially when
now retired Captain Scott Strathy carefully
unpackaged and displayed Sarah's clothing
that had been in storage for over 30 years--
her drill team jacket, shoes, sweater,
even her nylon stockings.
This was like opening a time capsule.
All of a sudden, they were real things.
They weren't even photographs.
They were the things she had on her body when she died.
You sort of felt yourself crumble.
After nine long days of testimony,
the case went to the jury.
Let's all rise for the jury.
It took them just over a day to reach a verdict.
I was shaking and just that-- there
was so much adrenaline and so much anticipation.
We the jury find the defendant, Patrick Leon--
Everything just dropped.
And it's like, what?
Why do you think it took law enforcement so long to identify
Patrick Nicholas as a suspect?
Take a look at a timeline of the case at 48hours.com.
[EERIE MUSIC]
This is the State of Washington versus Patrick Leon Nicholas.
Sarah Yarborough's loved ones had waited
over 30 years for this moment.
We the jury find the defendant--
But then, shock.
--not guilty of the crime of murder
in the first-degree premeditated.
Patrick Nicholas was found not guilty
of the first charge, premeditated first-degree
murder.
I remember dropping my head to my hands.
I was angry.
I was in disbelief.
When that first one came in not guilty, I closed my eyes.
But there were other charges, and there was still
hope of a conviction.
Guilty of the crime of murder in the first degree,
guilty in the second degree--
Patrick Nicholas was found guilty
of first-degree murder and second-degree murder.
The jury ruled both had been committed
with a sexual motivation.
I remember hearing the family behind me cry.
And I made eye contact with the jurors and nodded at them.
They got it.
They got it right.
I feel so grateful for those detectives, for the boys,
for the previous victims, for every witness
who took the stand, so grateful that all these people came
together.
Two weeks after Nicholas's conviction,
dozens of people who had been involved
in every part of Sarah's case gathered back
at the courthouse for his sentencing hearing.
Prosecutors asked the judge to impose extra time
to take into account all of Nicholas's crimes.
The sentencing hearing was exhilarating in a way
that I never expected.
It was probably the most raw human courage
I have ever seen in my life.
Sarah's death left our family broken,
and we've never been the same.
The pain in my father's voice over the phone telling me Sarah
was dead--
Person after person took to the podium
to say all that Patrick Nicholas had taken from them.
Coming face to face with pure evil
that day has deeply impacted my entire life.
He took her life and what was sure to be
a brilliant future from her.
In taking Sarah, he took the Innocence of every one of us.
To face Patrick Nicholas and to say what
they had been wanting to say to his face for 30 years--
Patrick Nicholas is pure evil.
--there was so much power in the room.
It was electric.
And then Anne Croney, who wasn't allowed
to testify at Sarah's trial, started speaking.
He just did a double take and shuddered when Anne stood up.
Like he saw a ghost.
Yes.
I'm sure he didn't expect to ever see my face
or hear my name ever again.
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, friends, and countless others.
I ask the court to please not make the same mistake.
After everyone spoke, Judge Josephine Wiggs
addressed the court.
And when I think about this poor child,
this poor child, what she experienced,
fighting for her life--
Judge Wiggs put her fist on the thing and said,
this was a child.
--a child.
She kept saying that.
And all I could think was, oh, my gosh, that's right.
We were children.
Nicholas received a sentence of almost 46 years.
For Sarah's family and friends, the sentence
brought mixed emotions.
I don't know that this is justice.
It is a verdict, and it is putting someone away
for something that they did.
But he got 30 years that she didn't get.
It makes me mad that he was free for so many years.
And who knows how many other people
were hurt during that time?
I don't know that we'll ever know.
And that could have been avoided.
Forensic genetic genealogy helped solve Sarah's case,
but prosecutors say similar technology could
have identified Patrick Nicholas years earlier
if only familial DNA searches were
allowed in Washington State.
In a familial DNA search, an unknown DNA sample
is compared against profiles already in CODIS
to search for possible family members.
Remember, Patrick Nicholas's brother's DNA
had been in CODIS for years.
The legislation just doesn't exist in this state
to allow that search.
California uses it.
The UK, as I understand, has--
New York, New York, Wisconsin--
New York.
--Minnesota, Colorado, Florida.
Do you think it's time to get that law changed?
We do.
The Yarboroughs agree and hope that Sarah's case
can make a difference.
I would like to know that other parents don't
have to wait 30 years.
What do you hope her legacy is?
I think her legacy is she was always someone
who brought people together.
She's brought all the people together
that attended the trial.
That's the kind of person she was.
For Drew Miller, who, at 13, found Sarah's body,
the connections made at trial finally brought him some peace.
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 that I needed.
This is probably the beginning of our junior year.
Sarah's friends will always remain bonded
by the past and Sarah's stolen future.
Not only was she beautiful, her soul was beautiful.
And the grace and the beauty that she carried and left
with all of us, we won't forget her.
We will never forget her.
[INSPIRING MUSIC]
[THEME MUSIC]
After the Murdaugh murders, a new lead
heats up this cold case, the mysterious unsolved death
of Stephen Smith.
Do you believe Stephen was murdered?
I do.
Investigating another tragedy in Murdaugh country--
What really happened to Stephen Smith?
48 Hours, Saturday on CBS and streaming on Paramount+.