“The case could have been solved decades earlier. [Investigators] claim that Washington state’s DNA database policies, laws and procedures are out of date and prevent police from using DNA to protect victims of violent crimes.” – Tim Schellberg, President, Gordon Thomas Honeywell Governmental Affairs
“Sarah’s case could have been solved decades earlier if Washington state had stronger DNA policies in place. Why aren’t they in place? Shouldn’t the state do what they can to utilize the full potential of DNA to solve crime, prevent crime and exonerate the innocent?” - Rockne Harmon, Ret. Senior Deputy DA, Alameda County DA’s Office
“The suspect’s brother was arrested for an offense in 2005, that offense met the requirement to have his DNA uploaded into CODIS. Had we had the capability to do familial DNA searching, we would have known in 2005 who murdered Sarah Yarborough.” - Kathy Decker, Ret. Detective, King County Sheriff’s Office
“Most of our efforts were stopped at the crime lab level. We heard arguments such as personnel, too much caseload, not enough money.”- Jim Allen, Ret. Detective, King County Sheriff’s Office
The above quotes, spoken by four different people during the 1-hour DNA Hit of the Year program at the HIDS conference Wednesday afternoon all allude to the same thing: justice could have been served in the Sarah Yarborough case much sooner if the law better reflected and reacted to the power of advancing DNA technology.
Sarah Yarborough’s murder
On the morning of Dec. 14, 1991, in a small town near Seattle, 16-year-old Sarah arrived to her high school campus early. She was waiting for a bus to take her and her classmates to a dance competition, when a stranger appeared and dragged her into a wooded area on campus.
Not long after, two young boys saw a man emerge from the woods, and when they moved closer after he left, they found Sarah’s body. She had been beaten and strangled to death with her stockings.
When police arrived, they noticed signs of sexual assault and were indeed able to recover semen from Sarah’s clothes. In the lab, a full DNA profile was developed from the crime scene evidence, and the police had two eyewitnesses who could describe the man in detail. All this evidence gave investigators hope they could solve the murder quickly.
But, the opposite happened.
“Twenty-eight years would pass before a suspect would be in custody,” said Schellberg. “Police exhausted every DNA matching strategy imaginable for nearly three decades. When the DNA profile did not match to the known offenders in the CODIS system, investigators educated themselves on other ways DNA could produce a lead. In fact, Sarah’s case was an early pioneer in phenotypic SNPs, Y-STR testing, and eventually the investigative miracle of genetic genealogy.”
Y-STR, Surnames and The Mayflower
Well-respected detective Jim Doyon worked Sarah’s case for 10 years—and 3,500 tips—before it was handed over to Allen upon Doyon’s retirement. Allen focused on the same thing Doyon had—the fact that they had a full DNA profile of the killer.
“I felt that since we had a full profile, there had to be some way we could solve it,” said Allen. “Maybe there was some other way we could do it, so I tried to educate myself. Familial DNA, SNPs- I had to teach myself all of this and how it fit.”
Eventually, through his own education efforts and networking, Allen was introduced to Colleen Fitzpatrick, the pioneer of forensic genetic genealogy—although in 2010, she wasn’t necessarily seen as that just yet.
“It occurred to me at some point that the Y-markers the genetic genealogy community used were the same the forensic scientists used,” said Fitzpatrick. “I figured given a Y profile from a cold case, I could compare that to the genetic genealogy Y databases and come up with a last name.”
And indeed she did (for this case and many other in the years to come).
Fitzpatrick found a Y-STR match for the Fuller surname, descendants of Robert Fuller of Salem, Massachusetts in the 1630s, a relative of the Mayflower Fullers. Suspicion fell on William Fuller, a long time Yarborough family friend, but a voluntary DNA sample ruled him out as the killer nor the father of the killer. However, his Y-STR profile matched the Y-profile from crime scene DNA, indicating he was a paternal cousin of the killer.
In an usual turn of events, investigators now had the killer’s probable last name, knew his genealogy going back to his descendants’ arrival in America, and had identified some kind of cousin—but still didn’t know who he was.
Still, Fitzpatrick’s introduction of genealogical concepts made a difference to Allen, who started focusing on familial DNA searching. He approached the Washington State Patrol crime lab but he says they were not receptive. Allen was frustrated.
“I could see we weren’t going to be able to get it done [in Seattle], but I knew California could do it,” he said.
When he retired in 2017, Allen—who says he stayed in the department longer than he originally intended trying to find Sarah’s killer—handed the case over to Detective Decker.
Everything changed on April 25, 2018—the day Decker learned about the Gold State Killer case.
“There aren’t words to describe what that day felt like because now we had a way to work around CODIS,” she said. “We had genetic genealogy.”
Fitzpatrick and her team took 2 weeks to match the DNA profile to an ancestor in a public genetic genealogy database, although the meticulous double checking took about a month in total. For the first time ever, investigators had a solid lead on a suspect.
With his name in hand, the King’s County Sheriff’s Office surveilled the suspect, obtained his discarded cigarette and quickly matched that sample to the DNA he left at the 1991 crime scene.
Laws and loopholes
As Fitzpatrick explains, the 2019 identification of Patrick Nicholas as a suspect using autosomal SNP testing raised awareness of the limitations of CODIS, and fueled debate over the role of familial searching versus forensic genetic genealogy—one that is still going on today.
In 1983, eight years before Sarah’s murder, Nicholas was convicted of attempted first-degree rape in Washington, but CODIS had not been launched yet. He was arrested again in 1993, two years after Sarah’s murder, for first degree child molestation. Although his DNA profile should have been entered into CODIS, he was allowed to plead to gross misdemeanor—a crime that does not require DNA collection.
To make matters worse, after Nicholas’ arrest, it was discovered that his brother Edward was already in CODIS for a conviction for rape in the first degree; he was also a registered sex offender. But, because Washington does not practice familial searching, Patrick had escaped detection a third time.
With his last name being Nicolas rather than Fuller, Patrick’s arrest ironically point out genetic genealogy loophole, as well. Patrick and Edward’s grandfather was adopted, meaning his legal surname was not his biological surname.
The more they stay the same
Three years later, the familial DNA discussion is as relevant as ever. While forensic genetic genealogy has taken off in the years since Sarah’s case became the first to use the technique to generate investigative leads, familial searching has not been well-received. In fact, only 10 states allow law enforcement to utilize familial DNA searching.
Last week, it was 11 states, but on Thursday, May 5, a New York appeals court halted the use of the technique. Lawmakers have already introduced a bill—Senate Bill S9089—to reestablish a state policy that allow familial DNA testing for those suspects charged with violent crimes, including murder, rape, kidnapping and terrorism.
DNA Hit of the Year
The deep dive into Sarah’s case and familial DNA occurred on Wednesday during the 6th annual DNA Hit of the Year program at Thermo Fisher Scientific’s Human Identification Solutions (HIDS) conference.
Every year since 2017, Gordon Thomas Honeywell Governmental Affairs partners with a group of international judges to determine which submitted case will be recognized as the “DNA Hit of the Year.” However, due to the pandemic, the program decided not to review new cases in 2021 and 2022, instead choosing to reflect on cases that were submitted in the previous four years but not selected by the judges as the Hit of the Year.
Sarah’s case was a 5th place finalist when it was submitted in 2020, the year the Brazilian “Robbery of the Century” was selected as the hit of the year.
The choice to focus on Sarah’s case was intentional.
“[Those involved in the investigation] hope Sarah Yarborough’s case will be a reminder to policymakers and politicians throughout the world that they should be constantly evaluating DNA laws to ensure they are taking full advantage of DNA’s power to protect our communities and exonerate the innocent,” said Harmon, a renowned prosecutor who was the first to utilize DNA in criminal trials. “Sarah’s family had to wait decades longer than they should have to have Sarah’s killer identified. Hopefully, other families won’t have to wait as long.”
Gordon Thomas Honeywell Governmental Affairs will be accepting new cases soon for the 2023 DNA Hit of the Year.