On May 10, 2023, Patrick Leon Nicholas was convicted of first-degree murder with special circumstances, and second-degree murder for the 1991 homicide of Federal Way high school student Sarah Yarborough. The now 59-year-old Nicholas was sentenced to 45 years and 8 months in prison.
The Yarborough is considered a landmark case for forensic genetic genealogy (FGG) in many ways. In 2011, it became the first case where direct-to-consumer (DTC) DNA test data was used to generate investigative leads for a cold case. When the case was solved in 2019 using autosomal SNP testing GEDmatch, it was discovered that Yarborough's killer could have been identified at least 20 years earlier through CODIS, but loopholes in the legal system had allowed him to avoid detection.
The murder of the high school drill team member had frustrated King County law enforcement for nearly 30 years and had deeply affected the tight knit community of Federal Way, Washington. The case had all of the solvability factors that could lead to success, including a full CODIS profile and two eyewitnesses who provided a description of the suspect. The Washington State Police Crime Laboratory routinely ran the profile in state and national CODIS databases. There were thousands of leads generated, with between 200-300 hundred individuals swabbed, but no suspect was identified.
In 2011, a milestone was achieved when Identifinders International, working with the King County Sheriff’s Office, performed a comparison between the Y-STR profile from the crime scene and the Y-STR genetic genealogy databases, the first comparison of its kind. The results indicated a possible last name of Fuller for Yarborough’s assailant, which led to William Fuller, a family friend who became a person of interest. He was ruled out by DNA as Yarborough's killer, but a near match between his Y-STR profile with the Y-STR developed from the crime scene indicated he was a paternal-line relative of the killer, introducing the concept of applying genealogy to cold case work. Yet, the case went cold again.
A second milestone was achieved in 2015, when the Yarborough homicide became one of the first forensic cases to undergo autosomal SNP testing outside of the DTC testing DNA testing pipeline with the aim of genetic genealogical analysis. Samples from both William Fuller and the crime scene were included as part of a proof-of-concept study for the Identitas Corp. v1 Forensic Chip, the first commercially available all-in-one tool dedicated to the concept of developing intelligence leads based on DNA. The results indicated that the killer was Caucasian European, and probably had brown hair and blue eyes, but unfortunately the estimate of his relationship with William Fuller was inconclusive, too remote to be predicted by the Identitas algorithms.
Finally in 2019, the Yarborough homicide was solved using DTC autosomal SNP data and GEDmatch. The identification of Patrick Nicholas as a suspect in September 2019 highlighted the limitations of CODIS, and fueled debate over the role of familial searching versus genetic genealogy.
Nicholas was convicted in 1983 of attempted first-degree rape in Benton County, WA before CODIS was launched in the 1990s. In 1993, he was arrested again for first-degree child molestation. Although his DNA profile should have been entered into CODIS, he was allowed to plead to gross misdemeanor that did not require DNA collection. He escaped detection a second time. After Nicholas’ arrest, it was discovered that his brother Edward had already been entered into CODIS for a prior conviction for rape in the first degree; he was also a registered sex offender. Because Washington does not practice familial searching, Patrick Nicholas had escaped detection a third time.
He had also initially escaped detection using genealogy. It was discovered that Patrick’s paternal grandfather had been adopted by a Nicholas family, so that the surname Nicholas was not what the initial genetic genealogical Y-STR analysis had predicted.
The Yarborough case is also important as one of the first where FGG has been introduced into court. Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick, President of Identifinders, was called to testify as an expert witness in April 2023 to address privacy concerns that the defense raised related to the Washington state constitution. The court agreed with the State that information provided by GEDmatch did not include personal data, nor information on anyone's genetic makeup, nor did GEDmatch reveal private health information. The court also ruled that the existence of a potential familial relationship flowing from the DNA he abandoned at the crime scene is not a private affair within the meaning of the Washington State Constitution, nor is the use of open-source references materials that identified that relationship.
The jury convicted Patrick Leon Nicholas of first-degree murder with sexual motivation as well as second-degree murder. On May 25, 2023, after hearing a morning full of witness impact statements from Yarborough's family and friends, this landmark case finally came to a close when the court sentenced Patrick Leon Nicholas to 45 years, 8 months in prison.
Republished courtesy of Identifinders International.