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More than three decades after four teenage girls were brutally murdered inside a Texas yogurt shop, authorities have finally named a suspect in the chilling 1991 cold case.
Austin Police announced that the crime has been linked to deceased serial killer and rapist Robert Eugene Brashers. A detective familiar with the case told CBS News the connection was made possible by DNA evidence and a bullet casing found at the scene. Brashers—who was connected to multiple assaults and murders across the country—died by suicide in 1999 during a standoff with police.
Who were the victims in the Yogurt Shop Murders?
For decades, the case has haunted the Austin, Texas community as investigators strived for answers.
On Dec. 6, 1991, Jennifer Harbinson, 17, and Eliza Thomas, 17, were working at the I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! store when Jennifer’s sister Sarah Harbinson, 15, and her friend Amy Ayers, 13, stopped by to get a ride home. That night, the store caught on fire and their bodies were ultimately found inside the shop with their hands bound with their underwear and their mouths gagged with cloth per The Associated Press.
Eliza, Jennifer and Sarah had been shot in the back of the head, according to News 8 Austin, while Amy, whose body was discovered apart from the others, was strangled to death and shot multiple times.
Although the fire had destroyed much of the evidence, police believed two different guns were used in the crime, according to CBS News.
Who was wrongfully accused in the Yogurt Shop Murders?
Years later, in 1999 Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Maurice Pierce and Forrest Welborn were arrested in connection to the murders. Pierce had drawn police attention when he was arrested at a mall not far from the yogurt shop with a .22 caliber gun.
After hours of questioning, Springsteen and Scott confessed, but later recanted and insisted the confessions were coerced, CBS News reported.
Both were convicted while charges against Pierce and Welborn were dropped.
The convictions were ultimately overturned after an appeals court ruled their sixth amendment rights had been violated. More advanced DNA testing seemed to rule them our as suspects and they were released from prison in 2009.
Who was Robert Brashers?
The case went cold for years until authorities named Brashers as a new suspect Friday, Sept. 26.
Austin Detective John Jones told CBS News that the weapon Brashers used to kill himself in January of 1999 was consistent with a bullet casing found in a drain inside the yogurt shop.
He was also linked to the case through DNA, Jones said.
Since his death, authorities have connected Brashers to several crimes. In 2018, Missouri authorities shared that he was suspected of killing Sherri Scherer and her 12-year-old daughter Megan, who had been sexually assaulted, in 1998. Police also linked him to the 1997 rape of a 14-year-old girl in Tennessee and the 1990 murder of Genevieve Zitricki, who was found strangled to death in her bathtub, according to the AP.
Where is Robert Brashers family now?
After news of her father’s connection to the yogurt shop murders, Brashers’ daughter Deborah Brashers admitted she doesn’t know what her father would have been doing in Austin at the time of the crime.
Though she told KXAN she once held her father “on a pedestal,” she said her feelings have changed over the years.
“There are people in this world that you don’t touch, and no matter how wrong you are and how much of a low-down, dirty pervert person you can be,” she told the outlet. “You don’t just touch children, and you don’t mess with women.”
“There are standards for even the evilest people in this world,” she continued. “And my father had to have been the seventh layer of Hades to be how he is and all of the things that are coming out.”
She also apologized to the victims’ families.
“I am very sorry to every family that my father hurt,” she said. “I know that it is not my place at all to tell you I am sorry, but someone has to because he was not sorry for it and half of my DNA is the person that hurt you the most, so I want to tell you sorry, and I am so sorry for everything, but I am finally glad that you are getting answers.”
