Journalism of Courage
For more than three decades, the brutal killing of four teenage girls inside an Austin yogurt shop has haunted Texas’ capital, baffled investigators and torn at the city’s memory. Now, police say DNA evidence has finally provided a breakthrough—linking the crime to a man who has been dead for 25 years.
Austin police on Friday identified Robert Eugene Brashers as a suspect in the December 1991 murders of Amy Ayers, 13; Eliza Thomas, 17; and sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, ages 17 and 15. Brashers, they said, died by suicide in 1999 during a motel standoff with police in Missouri. In the years since, he has been tied by DNA to rapes and murders in several states, including South Carolina, Tennessee and Missouri.
“Our team never gave up working this case,” Austin police said in a statement, calling the discovery a “significant breakthrough.” A full briefing is scheduled for Monday.
The murders, long known as the Yogurt Shop Murders, shocked Austin and became one of its most notorious unsolved crimes. On the night of December 6, 1991, the four girls were bound, gagged, and shot execution-style inside the “I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt” store, where two of them worked. The shop was then set ablaze. Firefighters battling the flames discovered the bodies.
Autopsy reports captured both the everyday innocence and the horror of that night: Ayers still wore her small white earrings, Sarah Harbison a gold necklace and Mickey Mouse watch, her sister Jennifer a Timex watch and high school ring. Their hands had been tied with underwear, their mouths gagged with cloth. Ayers had been shot twice.
For years, the investigation lurched through false confessions, damaged evidence, and trials that later collapsed. Four men, including teenagers Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott, were arrested in 1999 after giving confessions they later recanted, saying police coerced them. Both were convicted, with Springsteen initially sentenced to death before it was reduced to life. But in 2009, their convictions were overturned when new DNA testing—unavailable in 1991—pointed to an unidentified male.
That unknown profile now appears to match Brashers, a drifter whose violent crimes stretched across states before his 1999 death. Authorities say DNA evidence had already connected him to the 1990 strangulation of a South Carolina woman, the 1997 rape of a Tennessee teenager, and the 1998 shootings of a mother and daughter in Missouri.
The announcement comes just weeks after HBO released The Yogurt Shop Murders, renewing public attention on the decades-old case. While police say the case remains open, the long-awaited breakthrough may finally bring answers to a city that has waited 33 years.
(With Inputs from AP)
