Texas investigators have finally identified a suspect in the infamous killing of four teenage girls in 1991, known as the “Yogurt Shop Murders.” Newly discovered DNA evidence tied the grisly crime to Robert Eugene Brashers, a serial killer, who died by suicide during a stand-off with police in 1999.
Officials revealed the news at a press conference Monday, Sept. 29, saying the breakthrough came after DNA samples — taken from belt buckles, an ice cream scoop, and one victim’s fingernails — and ballistic casings were resubmitted to national databases. It was a DNA profile match with a 1990 sexual assault and murder case in Greenville, South Carolina that finally linked Brashers to the crime.
Brashers’ DNA was ultimately found in sexual assault kits performed on three of the victims, and it was also discovered in the fingernail clipping of one victim, Amy Ayers. “Amy’s final moments were to solve this case for us because of her fighting back,” Detective Daniel Jackson said at a press conference (via The New York Times).
The yogurt shop murders occurred on Dec. 6, 1991. Two 17-year-olds, Eliza Thomas and Jennifer Harbison, were working at the I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! store, when Ayers, 13, and Haribson’s sister, Sarah, 15, stopped by. It’s now believed that Bashers showed up around closing time, and investigators said there was no evidence to suggest he had an accomplice.
Joe Garza, the Travis County district attorney, said the “overwhelming weight of the evidence points to the guilt of one man and to the innocence of four.”
The bodies of the four teenagers were discovered the next morning when firefighters were called to put out a fire that had been set with lighter fluid. All four victims had been shot, three of them execution style. The fire had destroyed much of the physical evidence.
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The case confounded investigators for years, while the case was marred by false confessions, allegations of intimidation, and thousands of tips. In 1999, two teenagers were found guilty of murder, but their convictions were later overturned based on DNA evidence. (So far, one of the teens, Michael Scott, is seeking formal exoneration.)
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Just last month, HBO aired a four-part docuseries on the infamous crime, The Yogurt Shop Murders, which was directed by Margaret Brown. Speaking of the twists and turns that defined the case, and how she tried to wrap her head around them, Brown told Rolling Stone, “It took a long time, and honestly, I don’t know if my head is completely around it even now. But I started with the facts: What do we know? What can we agree on? And it’s what Beverly Lowery, who wrote the book Who Killed These Girls?, says in the first episode: ‘The first thing you have to know is the fire and the water.’ Those two things made the crime scene so hard to parse. But the second-most important thing is that, in 1991, DNA was new, and it was a really big deal that they got DNA at the crime scene at all. That wasn’t something you normally did in 1991 in Austin, Texas. If that hadn’t happened, who knows where we would be right now.”
