After more than a decade without leads, Austin police say they believe they have identified the man responsible for the yogurt shop murders of 1991 that left four Austin teens dead.
Austin Police Chief Lisa Davis said the only physical evidence located at the scene of the crime has been matched with Robert Eugene Brashers, who died by suicide in 1999 after a standoff with police in Missouri.
"This is one of the most devastating and haunting cases in this city's history," Davis said. "For the families of Amy, Eliza, Sarah and Jennifer, today marks a critical step forward in honoring, not only their memory, but getting at truth and accountability."
The murders of the four teenage girls have gripped Austinites since 1991. One December night, two employees of an "I Can't Believe It's Yogurt!" location near Northcross Mall, Eliza Thomas and Jennifer Harbison, were closing up shop with Harbison's sister, Sarah, and her friend, Amy Ayers. They were fatally shot and the building set on fire. Police believe at least one of the victims was sexually assaulted.
Austin Police used a combination of ballistic and genetic evidence collected from crimes across the country to connect Brashers to the murders.
Brashers was known to carry multiple weapons, tie his victims and sexually assault young women, Davis said.
Detective Dan Jackson, the lead investigator in the yogurt shop murders case since 2022, said the shell casing of the .380 pistol used during the murders matched one used in a cold case in Kentucky.
The match was made through the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, a program that collects and stores images of bullet casings to help link crimes.
Breakthroughs in DNA testing also helped identify Brashers. In 2018, Austin police re-submitted Brashers Y-STR profile — a DNA method used to identify male suspects — and it came back with a more complete genetic profile of the suspect, Jackson said. Investigators used the new Y-STR profile to connect Brashers with another similar crime in South Carolina.
Jackson said less than 48 hours after the yogurt shop murders, Brashers was documented passing through a border checkpoint in El Paso. He was driving a car stolen from Georgia and carrying a .380 pistol that was the same make and model as the one used during the crime, Jackson said.
“I’m sorry it took us 34 years to get here,” Jackson said. “But we’re here now.”
Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza said the investigation is ongoing and that "investigative steps" need to be made.
In 1999, Travis County prosecutors charged four men in connection with the murder. Police secured confessions from two of those suspects, Michael Scott and Robert Springsteen, and both were convicted. Scott was sentenced to death for capital murder and Springsteen was sentenced to life on the same charge. Both men later said their confessions were coerced by Austin police.
Maurice Pierce was also charged and held in a Travis County jail until charges were dismissed and he was released in 2003. Forrest Welborn, another suspect, was let go after a grand jury opted not to indict him.
In 2006, Scott's and Springsteen's sentences were thrown out by Texas' highest criminal court, and their charges were later dismissed by the Travis County district attorney in 2009 after new genetic evidence surfaced.
“This case stole decades of my life, but the truth has finally come to light,” Scott said in a statement on Monday.
The crime was recently the subject of an HBO docuseries and, until now, there had been no breakthrough in the case.
