Innocence Project -Exonerates Wrongful Conviction of Nicholas Yarris

Time Served: 21 years

On December 15, 1981, a young sales associate from the Tri-State mall in Pennsylvania was abducted in her car after her shift ended. When she did not arrive at home, hours after she was due, her husband called the police. Investigators quickly located her yellow Chrysler Cordoba, abandoned on a roadway in Chichester, PA. The following day, the victim’s body was found – beaten, stabbed, and raped – in a church parking lot a mile and a half away from her car. Newly fallen snow covered her body. She was still clothed but the murderer had cut open her thick winter clothing to commit the sexual assault. The police determined that she had bled to death from multiple stab wounds in her chest. Biological materials, including sperm samples and fingernail scrapings, were collected from the victim’s body. Police also collected gloves believed to have been left by the perpetrator from the victim’s car. The biological evidence collected from the crime scenes would prove to be pivotal in the years to come.

Four days after the discovery of the body, police stopped Nicholas Yarris on a Pennsylvania roadway for a traffic violation. The routine stop escalated into a violent confrontation between Yarris and the patrolman and ended in Yarris’s arrest for attempted murder of a police officer. While in custody for this offense, Yarris accused an acquaintance of committing the Tri-State mall murder in a gambit to gain his freedom. When this suspect was ruled out by the police, Yarris became the prime suspect of the murder investigation. According to a detective’s statement, Yarris was asked: “Did you mean to kill her?” and responded by saying “I never meant to kill anyone.”

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