The I Can't Believe It's Yogurt! shop where the four murders took place.
Detective Dan Jackson, of Austin's cold case unit, is confident he will solve the case of the yogurt shop murders.

After more than three decades, police in Austin identified the man they believe killed four teenage girls at a yogurt shop in 1991, a major step forward in a case that shocked the city and led to multiple wrongful convictions.

Authorities identified the likely suspect as Robert Eugene Brashers and described the slew of evidence that tied the serial killer to the grisly murders, including a match of DNA found under the fingernails of one of the victims.

"After 34 years, the Austin Police have made a significant breakthrough," said Austin Police Chief Lisa Davis at a news conference. "This is one of the most devastating and haunting cases in this city’s history."

The news comes as the case receives renewed interest following the release of HBO’s four-part docuseries, "The Yogurt Shop Murders."

Brashers, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot in 1999 after a standoff with police in Missouri, is believed to have committed at least seven murders across the country. He never faced trial for any of his crimes, as it was only after his death that advances in genetic and DNA technology linked him to the killings.

The Austin Police Department says the case remains open and has asked anyone with information about Brashers to contact the Texas Attorney General’s Office.

Shocking murders, cold trail

On Dec. 6, 1991, firefighters battling a blaze at "I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt" in Austin discovered the bodies of four teenage girls: Jennifer Harbison, 17; Sarah Harbison, 15; Eliza Thomas, 17; and Amy Ayers, 13.

The women were found nude, gagged, bound and shot, according to Daniel Jackson of the Austin Police Department, the lead detective on the case since 2022.

Jackson said at a news conference that Brashers is believed to have entered the store around closing time before launching his attack.

All the girls were shot with a .22 caliber pistol, but Amy Ayers was also shot with a .380 caliber weapon. A spent shell casing from the .380 caliber pistol on a floor drain was among the only pieces of physical evidence found at the scene, Jackson said.

The case mystified investigators as they struggled to vet thousands of tips and dozens of confessions that led nowhere. The investigation was also hampered by evidence that was lost in the fire.

For years, the case went cold.

Two men sentenced to life for the murders and later released

In 1999, four men were arrested in connection with the murders, including Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott, who had implicated each other under interrogation.

While the charges against the other men were dropped, Springsteen and Scott were put on trial and found guilty of the murders. Scott received life without parole, and Springsteen was put on death row until his sentence was reduced to life in prison.

In 2009, their convictions were overturned and both men were released after they were cleared through DNA.

There was never any physical evidence tying them to the crime scene, Jackson said.

'That’s when I knew we were getting somewhere'

After he inherited the case in 2022, Jackson submitted the spent shell casing found at the yogurt shop into a national ballistics database. Within hours, experts came back with a match to an unsolved murder in Kentucky in 1998. Jackson began working with investigators on that case to try and identify a possible suspect.

Meanwhile, he also resubmitted rape kit evidence from the Austin murders to labs across the country. Soon, a South Carolina lab said the DNA matched a sexual assault and murder case in 1990 out of Greenville. Brashers had been identified as the suspect in that case.

Speaking with Jackson, one South Carolina investigator asked if the victims in the yogurt shop had been bound with their own clothing.

"The hair stood up on the back of my neck and I knew we were getting somewhere, finally, with this case," Jackson said.

An unidentified serial killer

In the years following his suicide, Brashers was linked to multiple sexual assaults and unsolved murders across the country. But while DNA evidence suggested the same attacker was responsible for the bloodshed, police for years did not have a name.

"They knew they had a serial killer in these different jurisdictions, but they didn’t know who he was," Jackson said.

Investigators resorted to genealogy and eventually had Brashers’ close relatives tested for DNA. After some promising results, they got a court order in 2018 and exhumed Brashers’ body to test his DNA against pieces of evidence. Those results linked him to multiple murders and rapes.

Among the pieces of evidence that eventually linked Brashers to the yogurt shop murders was DNA under the fingernails of Amy Ayers.

"Amy’s final moments on this earth was to solve this case for us," Jackson said. "It’s because of her fighting back."

'Our families are still too small'

Several family members of the four slain teenagers spoke at a news conference on Sept. 29, expressing gratitude to law enforcement and describing the grief that has consumed their lives for decades.

Barbara Wilson, the mother of Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, thanked all the investigators who worked on the case.

"It has been so long, and all we ever wanted for this case was the truth," she said. "Thank you to the Austin Police Department for all the love and support you’ve given us over these 34 years."

Sonora Thomas, the sister of Eliza Thomas, said that while she's glad to finally know who was responsible for her sister’s murder, it does not change the fact that her sister is gone forever.

"Our families are still too small, still missing an essential ingredient and we are lesser for it," she said. "We have been robbed of a life with nieces and nephews and grandchildren and with sisters to grow old."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Yogurt Shop Murders' cold case solved? Suspect may be a serial killer.

Reporting by Christopher Cann, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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