In a dramatic turn in one of Texas’s most haunting unsolved crimes, Austin police have named Robert Eugene Brashers — a deceased serial offender — as a suspect in the 1991 murders of four adolescent girls at a frozen yogurt shop.
A Decades-Old Tragedy
On the night of December 6, 1991, four young women — Amy Ayers (13), Eliza Thomas (17), and sisters Jennifer (17) and Sarah Harbison (15) — were at an “I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt” shop in Austin when they were bound, shot, and the building set ablaze. Two of them were working; the others had stopped by for a ride home. The fire was so intense that the crucifix and ring belonging to Jennifer were melted.
At first, authorities treated the case as a botched robbery. Only around $50 was missing from the till. In the following years, the case spun through numerous leads, false confessions, and questionable prosecutions.
Arrests, Confessions, and Reversals
By 1999, four men — Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Maurice Pierce, and Forrest Welborn — were implicated, with Springsteen and Scott confessing under interrogation. However, both would later state their confessions were coerced. Their convictions were eventually overturned, in part because DNA evidence from the crime scene did not match any of them. All charges were dismissed in 2009.
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Brashers Entering the Frame
The breakthrough emerged through “extensive DNA testing,” officials say. Brashers, who died by suicide in 1999 after a standoff with law enforcement, had a long criminal record that included murder, sexual assault, and burglary across multiple states. Authorities had previously linked him to a 1998 double killing of a mother and daughter in Missouri, a 1997 rape in Texas, and a 1990 homicide in South Carolina.
Though Brashers is deceased, investigators stress the case remains open. They have not disclosed the precise nature of the DNA match. In a statement, Austin police affirmed: “our team never gave up working this case.”
The Legacy of Trauma and Justice
For more than three decades, the families of the victims and the community have sought answers. The case has remained in the public eye, partly through the HBO mini-series The Yogurt Shop Murders, which explores investigative missteps, coerced confessions, and the lingering pain for survivors and the city.
While Brashers’s identification offers a new direction, many questions persist: Was he acting alone? Was there DNA from other unknown perpetrators? Can justice be fully served when the primary suspect is beyond trial?
As forensic science advances, investigators hope that even with the suspect deceased, further evidence might provide the closure long sought by the victims’ families — and finally draw a painful chapter to a close.
