Latest / Deadly Divas True Crime Podcast / Episode 42: The Yogurt Shop Murders

Transcript

Episode 42: The Yogurt Shop Murders · Deadly Divas True Crime Podcast

0:11
SPEAKER_00: Hello, true crime divas and dudes.
0:14
SPEAKER_00: I'm Tina, and welcome back to your favorite true crime podcast, Deadly Divas.
0:20
SPEAKER_01: And I'm Sarah.
0:21
SPEAKER_01: If you're new here, welcome.
0:23
SPEAKER_01: Every Friday we break down a new true crime case just for you.
0:28
SPEAKER_00: Today we are covering a case that haunted Austin, Texas for more than three decades.
0:34
SPEAKER_00: The yogurt shop murders.
0:36
SPEAKER_00: Four teenage girls were murdered inside a frozen yogurt shop.
0:41
SPEAKER_00: Police investigated thousands of leads.
0:44
SPEAKER_00: Four teenage boys were eventually accused.
0:48
SPEAKER_00: Two were convicted, and one was sentenced to death.
0:52
SPEAKER_00: For years, authorities believed they'd finally figured out what happened.
0:57
SPEAKER_01: But they definitely hadn't.
0:59
SPEAKER_01: And in a very different way, those four boys would become victims of this case too.
1:05
SPEAKER_01: Because nearly 34 years after the girls were murdered, forensic evidence finally identified the man investigators now say was responsible.
1:17
SPEAKER_00: And that's what makes this case absolutely insane.
1:20
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't any of the men police had spent decades investigating.
1:25
SPEAKER_00: In fact, it wasn't even someone who was on their radar at all.
1:30
SPEAKER_00: After more than three decades of investigations, interrogations, arrests, trials, and appeals, the answer seemingly came out of nowhere.
1:42
SPEAKER_00: And when investigators finally figured out who this man was, they discovered something even more unbelievable.
1:49
SPEAKER_00: Law enforcement had actually encountered him less than 48 hours after the murders.
1:55
SPEAKER_00: They just had absolutely no idea who they had in front of them.
2:00
SPEAKER_00: Now, before we get into it, a quick warning.
2:03
SPEAKER_00: Today's episode involves the murders and sexual assaults of minors.
2:08
SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to get unnecessarily graphic, but some details are important to understanding the investigation.
2:16
SPEAKER_00: So please take care while listening.
2:18
SPEAKER_00: Now let's get into it.
2:20
SPEAKER_00: Before this became the Yogurt Shop Murders, there were four girls, Jennifer Harbison, Sarah Harbison, Eliza Thomas, and Amy Ayers.
2:30
SPEAKER_00: And before we talk about what happened to them, I want to spend a minute talking about who they actually were.
2:37
SPEAKER_00: Jennifer Harbison was 17 years old and a senior at Lanier High School.
2:42
SPEAKER_00: Jennifer was busy, ambitious, and hardworking.
2:46
SPEAKER_00: She was involved in the FFA, and that's the Future Farmers of America, for any of y'all who may not know.
2:52
SPEAKER_00: She ran track and she was also the head of the school's drill team.
2:57
SPEAKER_00: Through the FFA, she and her younger sister regularly visited a local farm where they cared for lambs and other animals.
3:06
SPEAKER_00: Jennifer had also recently gotten a dark blue Chevy pickup truck, and she took the job at the I can't believe it's yogurt shop to help make the payments on it.
3:17
SPEAKER_00: Her younger sister, Sarah Harbison, was 15 and a freshman at Lanier.
3:23
SPEAKER_00: The sisters were close, and Sarah was beginning to build a life of her own at the same high school where Jennifer was already established.
3:32
SPEAKER_00: She enjoyed sports and school clubs and, like Jennifer, was involved with the FFA.
3:38
SPEAKER_00: Eliza Thomas was also 17, a senior at Lanier, and one of Jennifer's friends and coworkers at the yogurt shop.
3:46
SPEAKER_00: Her younger sister, Sonora, remembers Eliza as incredibly social and energetic.
3:53
SPEAKER_00: She loved fitness and fashion and was at the very teenage stage of experimenting with her style and figuring out exactly who she wanted to become.
4:02
SPEAKER_00: She was interested in modeling and had an entire adult life ahead of her that she was just beginning to imagine.
4:09
SPEAKER_00: And finally, there was Amy Ayers, the youngest of the four.
4:13
SPEAKER_00: Amy was only 13 years old and an eighth grader at Burnett Middle School.
4:18
SPEAKER_00: Her family described her as a cowgirl and an old soul, even at such a young age.
4:24
SPEAKER_00: She loved animals and dreamed of becoming a veterinarian someday.
4:28
SPEAKER_00: Amy was also involved with the FFA, which is how she became friends with the older girls.
4:34
SPEAKER_00: So these were four girls at slightly different stages of being teenagers.
4:39
SPEAKER_00: Jennifer was approaching graduation and working to pay for her first vehicle.
4:44
SPEAKER_00: Eliza was figuring out who she wanted to become.
4:48
SPEAKER_00: Sarah was just beginning high school, and Amy hadn't even made it there yet.
4:54
SPEAKER_01: And I love that they were all part of this FFA, such a wholesome, positive thing.
4:59
SPEAKER_01: Of all the things that teenagers can be involved in, that seemed like a good thing for them to be aiming their interests at.
5:04
SPEAKER_00: I know.
5:05
SPEAKER_00: They just seemed like nice, like you said, wholesome girls that were doing all the right things.
5:12
SPEAKER_00: So on Friday, December 6, 1991, Jennifer and Eliza were working the closing shift at the yogurt shop.
5:20
SPEAKER_00: Sarah and Amy were not working there at all.
5:23
SPEAKER_00: They had come by near closing and were planning to leave with the older girls afterwards.
5:29
SPEAKER_00: Jennifer was supposed to drive everybody home.
5:32
SPEAKER_00: It was an incredibly ordinary Friday night.
5:35
SPEAKER_00: Two teenage girls finishing work, a younger sister and her friend waiting for them.
5:41
SPEAKER_00: Then everybody gets into Jennifer's truck and goes home.
5:45
SPEAKER_00: Except tragically, they never got to leave the yogurt shop that night.
5:50
SPEAKER_00: The shop was scheduled to close at eleven o'clock that night.
5:54
SPEAKER_00: Customers came and went throughout the evening.
5:58
SPEAKER_00: Most seemed completely unremarkable, although witnesses would later remember a few people who stood out, including a man who had been acting strangely around 10 PM and two men sitting together near closing time who made one customer uncomfortable.
6:14
SPEAKER_00: At the time, though, nobody had any reason to believe something horrific was about to happen.
6:21
SPEAKER_00: But at some point around closing time, someone took control of those four girls.
6:28
SPEAKER_00: All four were stripped, bound, and gagged, and investigators found evidence of sexual assault.
6:35
SPEAKER_00: Then the girls were shot.
6:38
SPEAKER_00: Three were killed with 22 caliber ammunition.
6:43
SPEAKER_00: Amy was shot with a 380 caliber weapon.
6:47
SPEAKER_00: Afterward, the killer set the yogurt shop on fire, hoping to destroy any traces of evidence.
6:54
SPEAKER_00: Shortly before midnight, an Austin police patrol officer noticed smoke coming from the business.
7:00
SPEAKER_00: Firefighters arrived just expecting a commercial fire.
7:05
SPEAKER_00: Instead, once the flames were under control, they discovered four bodies Jennifer, Sarah, Eliza, and Amy.
7:16
SPEAKER_00: Like, can you imagine being those firefighters?
7:19
SPEAKER_01: That's just horrible.
7:20
SPEAKER_01: That's like worst case frickin' scenario.
7:23
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
7:24
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, horrific.
7:25
SPEAKER_00: And there was no obvious suspect here.
7:29
SPEAKER_00: There was no clear motive and no apparent reason why four girls had been targeted inside a neighborhood yogurt shop.
7:37
SPEAKER_00: One early theory was that this may have started as a robbery that spiraled horribly out of control.
7:43
SPEAKER_00: Investigators wondered whether whoever entered the store expected to find only two employees that night, Jennifer Eliza, but instead encountered Sarah and Amy too, leaving four potential witnesses instead of just two.
7:59
SPEAKER_00: But that was only a theory.
8:01
SPEAKER_00: And with so little money actually taken from the store, investigators couldn't even be certain robbery had been the motive.
8:09
SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, the fire damaged a crime scene, but it did not destroy everything.
8:14
SPEAKER_00: Investigators preserved biological evidence and bullet and cartridge casings, including a 380 casing recovered from a drain.
8:24
SPEAKER_00: At the time, none of it could tell police who the killer was, but they preserved it.
8:31
SPEAKER_00: And eventually that would be the major turning point in this case.
8:35
SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, these murders horrified the community of Austin.
8:41
SPEAKER_00: This wasn't somewhere people associated with danger.
8:44
SPEAKER_00: It was a frozen yogurt shop in a shopping center.
8:48
SPEAKER_00: And the victims were children.
8:51
SPEAKER_00: Parents suddenly looked differently at their teenagers' evening jobs, and businesses reconsidered their closing procedures.
9:00
SPEAKER_00: And because nobody knew why the girls had been targeted, everybody wondered whether it could happen again and if their daughters could be next.
9:09
SPEAKER_00: The community rallied around the families.
9:12
SPEAKER_00: More than 1,500 people attended the girls' funeral.
9:17
SPEAKER_00: White ribbons appeared around Austin, and Billboards showed their faces and asked, Who killed these girls?
9:25
SPEAKER_00: Six months later, roughly 1,200 people marched toward the Texas Capitol carrying white candles beneath a banner reading, We WONT forget.
9:36
SPEAKER_00: Police were absolutely overwhelmed with potential suspects and leads.
9:41
SPEAKER_00: At one point, investigators had 342 people listed as possible suspects.
9:50
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
9:50
SPEAKER_00: And over the years, multiple people would actually confess to these murders, only for investigators to determine that their stories just didn't add up.
10:00
SPEAKER_00: They looked at known violent offenders, people reported by tipsters, and eventually even pursued suspects in Mexico after men there claimed responsibility for the crime.
10:12
SPEAKER_00: Again and again, though, those leads fell apart.
10:16
SPEAKER_00: But just eight days after the murders, police encountered a teenager named Maurice Pierce.
10:23
SPEAKER_00: And through him, three other teenage boys would be pulled into the investigation.
10:29
SPEAKER_00: Their lives would become permanently intertwined with the yogurt shop murders.
10:35
SPEAKER_00: On December 14th, 1991, just eight days after the murders, sixteen-year-old Maurice Pierce was arrested at North Cross Mall, only blocks from the yogurt shop, carrying a twenty-two caliber handgun and ammunition.
10:51
SPEAKER_00: And this wasn't just some completely random guns.
10:55
SPEAKER_00: It was the same caliber and with the same make and model as one of the weapons investigators believed had been used to murder the girls.
11:04
SPEAKER_00: So obviously, police wanted to know a whole lot more about Maurice Pierce.
11:09
SPEAKER_00: And once they started questioning him, things got even more suspicious.
11:15
SPEAKER_00: Pierce began implicating other teenagers he knew.
11:19
SPEAKER_00: He told investigators that his 15-year-old friend Forrest Wellburn had borrowed the gun and used it in the yogurt shop murders.
11:27
SPEAKER_00: At one point, Pierce claimed that he had driven a getaway car while Wellburn and two other teenagers, Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott, both 17 years old at the time, committed the murders.
11:42
SPEAKER_00: And there was another detail that probably didn't help these guys look innocent.
11:46
SPEAKER_00: Shortly after the murders, Pierce, Wellburn, Springsteen, and Scott had actually stolen an SUV and taken it on a joy ride to San Antonio together.
12:00
SPEAKER_00: So put yourself in the investigator's shoes for a minute.
12:03
SPEAKER_00: You have four teenage boys who admittedly stole a vehicle and left town shortly after four girls were murdered.
12:10
SPEAKER_00: One of them gets caught days later, just blocks from the crime scene, carrying the same type of gun used in the murders.
12:19
SPEAKER_00: And then that teenager starts telling you that his friends admitted to killing the girls.
12:25
SPEAKER_00: Of course the police were going to investigate these people.
12:29
SPEAKER_00: In fact, investigators took Pierce's claim seriously enough that they wired him and sent him to talk to Forrest Welburn, hoping Welburn would repeat the supposed confession while police could hear.
12:43
SPEAKER_00: But that's where the story started falling apart.
12:47
SPEAKER_00: Welburn did not confess.
12:49
SPEAKER_00: According to investigators listening to the conversation, he actually seemed extremely confused by what Pierce was trying to imply.
12:58
SPEAKER_00: And when police began checking Pierce's story against the actual crime scene, other details did not match either.
13:06
SPEAKER_00: The twenty-two Pierce had been carrying couldn't be conclusively tied to the murders.
13:11
SPEAKER_00: And despite everything suspicious surrounding this group, investigators still had no physical evidence placing any of the four boys inside that yogurt shop.
13:21
SPEAKER_00: Eventually, the original investigators concluded they just didn't have enough evidence against them, and they were all released.
13:29
SPEAKER_00: But their names stayed in that case file.
13:32
SPEAKER_00: And years later, a different group of investigators would circle back.
13:38
SPEAKER_00: In the meantime, investigators kept looking elsewhere, and some of those leads got pretty bizarre.
13:45
SPEAKER_00: They even looked into a local group that was really into vampires, the occult, and graveyard rituals.
13:53
SPEAKER_00: They actually raided the home of one of the members of that group, like literally burst through her door with a SWAT team, and they found what they thought were human skeletal remains, but after testing, determined they were just props and animal bones.
14:09
SPEAKER_00: It was ultimately determined that group had nothing to do with the murders, but they were still accused and slandered relentlessly.
14:18
SPEAKER_00: From here, years passed.
14:20
SPEAKER_00: The yogurt shop murders became one of Austin's most notorious unsolved crimes.
14:25
SPEAKER_00: For the families, there was never a real endpoint.
14:28
SPEAKER_00: Every anniversary brought more coverage.
14:30
SPEAKER_00: Every promising lead created hope.
14:32
SPEAKER_00: Every call from police could potentially be the one.
14:37
SPEAKER_00: But then another lead would collapse.
14:40
SPEAKER_00: And the detectives were affected too.
14:43
SPEAKER_00: Some of the investigators who walked into that yogurt shop would continue thinking about those four girls for decades.
14:50
SPEAKER_00: Then in the late 1990s, police began taking another hard look at the case.
14:55
SPEAKER_00: They revisited old evidence and re-examined old suspects.
15:00
SPEAKER_00: And they returned to Maurice Pierce, Forrest Swelburn, Robert Springsteen, and Michael Scott.
15:08
SPEAKER_00: By then, the teenagers police had questioned in 1991 were grown men.
15:14
SPEAKER_00: And this time investigators became convinced there was something there.
15:21
SPEAKER_00: In 1999, Springsteen and Scott underwent lengthy police interrogations.
15:29
SPEAKER_00: Both eventually confessed.
15:31
SPEAKER_00: And on the surface, multiple people confessing to the same quadruple murder sounds incredibly convincing.
15:39
SPEAKER_00: But all three men who had confessed, Pearson 1991 and Springsteen and Scott years later, recanted or disputed their statements.
15:51
SPEAKER_00: Scott repeatedly denied involvement during hours of questioning before eventually agreeing with investigators' version of events.
15:59
SPEAKER_00: Springsteen also later said his confession was coerced.
16:03
SPEAKER_00: Prosecutors believed the statements contained details only participants could know.
16:08
SPEAKER_00: Defense attorneys argued that after years of questioning, investigators themselves had supplied or contaminated those details.
16:17
SPEAKER_00: And there was already another reason to be concerned about interrogation practices in Austin.
16:22
SPEAKER_00: Detective Hector Polanko, who interrogated Pierce, was also involved in another Austin murder investigation in which Christopher Ochoa falsely confessed.
16:33
SPEAKER_00: Ochoa and another man, Richard Danziger, were eventually exonerated after the actual killer came forward.
16:41
SPEAKER_00: But in 1999, police still believed they'd finally solved the yogurt shop murders.
16:47
SPEAKER_00: Pierce, Wellburn, Springsteen, and Scott were arrested.
16:51
SPEAKER_00: After almost eight years, Austin had four men accused of murdering Jennifer, Sarah, Eliza, and Amy.
17:00
SPEAKER_00: But the cases did not unfold equally.
17:03
SPEAKER_00: Two separate grand juries refused to indict Forrest Wellburn.
17:08
SPEAKER_00: The case against Maurice Pierce was eventually dismissed.
17:12
SPEAKER_00: Springsteen and Scott went to trial.
17:15
SPEAKER_00: Robert Springsteen was tried in 2001.
17:19
SPEAKER_00: Prosecutors relied heavily on the confession evidence.
17:23
SPEAKER_00: He was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death.
17:29
SPEAKER_00: Because Springsteen had been 17 when the murders occurred, his death sentence was later reduced to life after the U.S.
17:36
SPEAKER_00: Supreme Court barred executions for crimes committed by juveniles.
17:41
SPEAKER_00: Michael Scott went to trial in 2002.
17:45
SPEAKER_00: He was also convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life without parole.
17:50
SPEAKER_00: For much of the public, the mystery finally seemed solved.
17:55
SPEAKER_00: There had been four suspects, multiple confessions, two convictions, and one man had been sentenced to death.
18:04
SPEAKER_00: But underneath those verdicts was an enormous problem.
18:08
SPEAKER_00: There was no physical evidence tying Springsteen or Scott to that crime scene.
18:16
SPEAKER_00: And eventually, both the law and science began pulling the cases apart.
18:22
SPEAKER_00: In 2004, the United States Supreme Court issued a major ruling in Crawford v.
18:28
SPEAKER_00: Washington, strengthening a defendant's constitutional right to confront witnesses whose statements are being used against them.
18:36
SPEAKER_00: That mattered in this case because statements from Scott and Springsteen had been used against one another, even though neither testified at the other's trial.
18:46
SPEAKER_00: Their convictions were eventually overturned, but prosecutors still planned to retry them.
18:53
SPEAKER_00: And then DNA changed everything.
18:56
SPEAKER_00: Testing of biological evidence from the crime scene produced what is called a YSTR profile.
19:04
SPEAKER_00: Basically, ISTR testing specifically examines markers on the male Y chromosome.
19:10
SPEAKER_00: It's especially useful when investigators are trying to isolate a small amount of male DNA from evidence containing a much larger amount of female DNA.
19:19
SPEAKER_00: And the important part here was simple.
19:22
SPEAKER_00: The male DNA from the yogurt shop evidence did not belong to Springsteen, nor Scott, nor Pierce, nor Wellburn.
19:32
SPEAKER_00: There was another man's DNA connected to this crime, and investigators had absolutely no idea who he was.
19:40
SPEAKER_00: In 2009, prosecutors dismissed the remaining charges against Springsteen and Scott and both were released.
19:48
SPEAKER_00: But even then, prosecutors did not immediately declare the four men innocent.
19:53
SPEAKER_00: They argued that the unknown DNA could theoretically belong to an additional participant.
20:00
SPEAKER_00: So the mystery wasn't over.
20:02
SPEAKER_00: If these four men weren't responsible, who was that unknown man?
20:06
SPEAKER_00: And unfortunately, Austin would not get that answer for another 16 years.
20:13
SPEAKER_00: And this is the point where the yogurt shock case essentially entered another era.
20:17
SPEAKER_00: The original convictions were gone.
20:20
SPEAKER_00: The men police had spent years pursuing were no longer behind bars, and somewhere in the evidence was DNA belonging to a man nobody could identify.
20:31
SPEAKER_00: But technology kept improving, investigators continued revisiting the evidence.
20:37
SPEAKER_00: Cold cases across the country began being solved using DNA methods that would have sounded like science fiction in 1991.
20:47
SPEAKER_00: But year after year, the yogurt shop murders remained unsolved.
20:52
SPEAKER_00: The families kept waiting, Austin kept remembering, and the unknown male DNA remained exactly that.
21:00
SPEAKER_00: Unknown.
21:02
SPEAKER_00: Until 2025.
21:04
SPEAKER_00: Austin police detective Daniel Jackson was reviewing the yogurt shop evidence when he focused on something that had been sitting in the case for more than three decades.
21:14
SPEAKER_00: That 380 cartridge casing recovered from the drain.
21:17
SPEAKER_00: In June 2025, Jackson resubmitted that casing to the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network or NIBEN.
21:26
SPEAKER_00: Niven allows investigators to compare ballistic evidence from crimes around the country and identify potential connections between cases.
21:34
SPEAKER_00: Apparently, when a gun is fired, different parts of the firearm can leave microscopic markings on the cartridge casing.
21:42
SPEAKER_00: Niven compares images of those markings against ballistic evidence from other crimes, looking for potential matches, basically allowing investigators to ask whether the same gun might have been used in two completely different crimes.
21:57
SPEAKER_01: I thought that was really fascinating.
21:58
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely fascinating.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: I didn't know that either.
22:01
SPEAKER_00: It's like DNA.
22:02
SPEAKER_00: DNA for a gun.
22:03
SPEAKER_00: I know.
22:04
SPEAKER_01: Crazy.
22:04
SPEAKER_00: But good.
22:05
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: So when investigators entered the casing from the yogurt shop murders, Niven flanged a potential match to a casing from a murder committed seven years later and hundreds of miles away in Kentucky.
22:18
SPEAKER_00: And suddenly investigators had a completely new direction to follow.
22:23
SPEAKER_00: So they started digging.
22:24
SPEAKER_00: And the Kentucky case led them toward even more related crimes.
22:29
SPEAKER_00: Then they turned back to DNA.
22:31
SPEAKER_00: The unknown YSTR profile from the Yogurt Shop sexual assault evidence was manually compared with DNA evidence from an unsolved 1990 murder in Greenville, South Carolina.
22:42
SPEAKER_00: And it produced a complete 27 marker match.
22:46
SPEAKER_00: The same paternal DNA profile appeared in both cases.
22:51
SPEAKER_00: Except South Carolina investigators already knew something Austin detectives didn't know in 1991.
22:58
SPEAKER_00: They knew who had committed that South Carolina murder.
23:02
SPEAKER_00: And suddenly, after almost 34 years, the unknown man from the yogurt shop murders had a name.
23:10
SPEAKER_00: Robert Eugene Brashiers.
23:13
SPEAKER_00: And if you're sitting here thinking, who the hell is Robert Brashears?
23:17
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
23:18
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
23:20
SPEAKER_00: Because he was not one of the four men we just spent this entire episode talking about.
23:25
SPEAKER_00: He wasn't a forgotten yogurt shop suspect.
23:28
SPEAKER_00: He wasn't somebody police even questioned in 1991.
23:33
SPEAKER_00: He wasn't secretly connected to Springsteen or Scott.
23:37
SPEAKER_00: He was essentially a total stranger to this entire investigation.
23:40
SPEAKER_00: But Robert Eugene Brashiers was certainly no stranger to violence.
23:44
SPEAKER_00: By the time Austin investigators finally connected him to the yogurt shop murders, he'd already been identified as a serial killer and sexual offender responsible for violent crimes across the country.
23:57
SPEAKER_00: Brashers had served prison time after shooting a woman during a burglary in Florida.
24:03
SPEAKER_00: Then, in 1990, Genevieve Zitriki was sexually assaulted and murdered in Greenbell, South Carolina.
24:13
SPEAKER_00: That was the murder whose DNA evidence had now matched the yogurt shop YSTR profile.
24:19
SPEAKER_00: In 1997, a 14-year-old girl was sexually assaulted in Tennessee.
24:25
SPEAKER_00: Then in 1998, Sherry Shearer and her 12-year-old daughter Megan were murdered in Missouri.
24:32
SPEAKER_00: For years, those crimes weren't connected.
24:35
SPEAKER_00: And then there was another problem.
24:37
SPEAKER_00: Robert Brashears couldn't be arrested for any of this.
24:41
SPEAKER_00: Why?
24:42
SPEAKER_00: Because he'd been dead since 1999.
24:46
SPEAKER_00: That year, in Missouri, during a police standoff that started over something pretty trivial, a stolen license plate, Bruchires shot himself rather than surrender.
24:58
SPEAKER_00: Thankfully, though, advances in forensic genealogy eventually connected him to multiple unsolved crimes.
25:05
SPEAKER_00: In 2018, his body was exhumed and DNA confirmed his identity as the perpetrator.
25:12
SPEAKER_00: So by 2025, investigators knew Robert Brashears was a serial predator and killer, but that alone didn't prove he murdered Jennifer, Sarah, Eliza, and Amy.
25:24
SPEAKER_00: They needed more.
25:25
SPEAKER_00: And thankfully, they had it.
25:27
SPEAKER_00: One of the most important pieces of evidence in this entire case had been preserved from Amy Ayers.
25:34
SPEAKER_00: And remember, poor Amy was just 13 years old when she was murdered.
25:40
SPEAKER_00: Investigators recovered DNA from underneath her fingernails, and that implication was heartbreaking.
25:47
SPEAKER_00: Amy had apparently fought for her life.
25:51
SPEAKER_00: Unlike the YSTR evidence, which can be shared among males from the same paternal family line, investigators were able to develop a more individually identifying DNA profile from the material beneath Amy's fingernails.
26:06
SPEAKER_00: And that profile matched Robert Eugene Brashier's.
26:10
SPEAKER_00: Now investigators weren't simply looking at a similar crime committed by someone with a matching paternal DNA line.
26:17
SPEAKER_00: They had Brashier's DNA underneath the fingernails of one of the murdered girls.
26:23
SPEAKER_00: He set the yogurt shop on fire, trying to destroy evidence, but he had not destroyed everything.
26:32
SPEAKER_00: Amy had apparently taken a tiny piece of him with her, and almost 34 years later, it told investigators his name.
26:41
SPEAKER_00: Now investigators could go backwards.
26:45
SPEAKER_00: Where was Robert Bashiers when the girls were murdered?
26:49
SPEAKER_00: Was he even in Texas?
26:50
SPEAKER_00: Could they place him anywhere near Austin?
26:52
SPEAKER_00: And that's when they discovered something almost impossible to believe.
26:56
SPEAKER_00: December 8, 1991, less than 48 hours after the murders, U.S.
27:02
SPEAKER_00: Border Patrol encountered Robert Bashears at a checkpoint along Interstate 10 between El Paso, Texas, and Las Cruces, New Mexico.
27:12
SPEAKER_00: He was driving a stolen vehicle.
27:14
SPEAKER_00: When authorities attempted to detain him, he fled.
27:18
SPEAKER_00: And inside that stolen vehicle was a 380 caliber AMT backup pistol.
27:25
SPEAKER_00: Remember, Amy Ayers had been shot with a 380 caliber weapon.
27:29
SPEAKER_00: Investigators later confirmed through the gun's serial number that it was the same firearm Brashears still possessed when he died in 1999.
27:40
SPEAKER_00: So less than two days after the yogurt shot murders, law enforcement had actually crossed paths with the man investigators now say committed them.
27:52
SPEAKER_00: He was in a stolen vehicle, he had a 380 pistol, and nobody had any idea what he may have just done.
27:59
SPEAKER_00: But that's also important to put into context.
28:02
SPEAKER_00: In 1991, there was no obvious reason for Border Patrol officers near New Mexico to connect this man to a quadruple murder hundreds of miles away in Austin.
28:12
SPEAKER_00: There wasn't a national DNA system capable of instantly making that connection.
28:18
SPEAKER_00: They didn't know that biological evidence sitting inside a burned yogurt shop belonged to the man in front of them.
28:25
SPEAKER_00: The forensic bridge simply did not exist in 1991.
28:30
SPEAKER_00: Thirty-four years later, though, it did.
28:33
SPEAKER_00: Investigators searched for any connection between Brashears and the four men they'd spent years pursuing.
28:40
SPEAKER_00: They found none.
28:42
SPEAKER_00: There was no evidence that Springsteen, Scott, Pierce, or Wellburn even knew Robert Brashears.
28:51
SPEAKER_00: No evidence they'd helped him, and no evidence that Brashears was simply some previously unidentified fifth participant.
28:58
SPEAKER_00: Authorities concluded that Brashears acted alone, which meant the theory that had sent Robert Springsteen to death row and Michael Scott to prison for life had been completely wrong.
29:11
SPEAKER_00: On September 29th, 2025, Austin officials publicly announced the breakthrough.
29:17
SPEAKER_00: Nearly 34 years after Jennifer, Sarah, Eliza, and Amy were murdered, authorities could definitively say that Robert Eugene Brushiers committed the yogurt shop murders.
29:32
SPEAKER_00: For the families, the announcement answered a question some had begun to believe would never be answered.
29:38
SPEAKER_00: Eliza's sister, Sonora Thomas, said she'd reached a point where she thought she might die without knowing who killed her sister, and now she knew.
29:50
SPEAKER_00: It couldn't give Eliza back, it couldn't return Jennifer and Sarah to their family, it couldn't allow Amy to grow beyond thirteen.
29:59
SPEAKER_00: But after almost thirty-four years, the question on those Austin billboards finally had an answer.
30:07
SPEAKER_00: Identifying Brishiers also forced authorities to confront what had happened to the four men who were just teenagers when they were accused in his place.
30:16
SPEAKER_00: Robert Springsteen had been sentenced to death.
30:19
SPEAKER_00: Michael Scott had received life without parole.
30:22
SPEAKER_00: Maurice Pierce had been jailed and publicly accused, and Forrest Welburn had spent decades with his name attached to the murders despite two grand juries refusing to indict him.
30:34
SPEAKER_00: Maurice Pierce never lived to see this case solved.
30:39
SPEAKER_00: He died in 2010 following a confrontation with police during a traffic stop.
30:46
SPEAKER_00: For years, being released or having charges dismissed hadn't completely cleared these men's names.
30:53
SPEAKER_00: That finally changed in 2026.
30:56
SPEAKER_00: On february nineteenth, twenty twenty-six, a Travis County courtroom formally declared Michael Scott, Robert Springsteen, Forrest Welbur, and Maurice Pierce were actually innocent.
31:11
SPEAKER_00: Not simply that there wasn't enough evidence to prosecute them, but innocent.
31:16
SPEAKER_00: For Pierce's daughter, Marissa, it was an emotional moment.
31:20
SPEAKER_00: Speaking to her deceased father, she said, Daddy, you have your name back.
31:26
SPEAKER_00: Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza apologized for the wrongful prosecutions and acknowledged the additional pain they'd caused both the accused men and the victims' families.
31:40
SPEAKER_00: Then, on May 28, 2026, the Austin City Council formally approved settlements totaling up to$35 million.
31:51
SPEAKER_00: Springsteen and Scott were each allocated about$10 million each.
31:55
SPEAKER_00: Welburn received almost$5 million, and an additional$10 million went to Pierce's estate and family.
32:02
SPEAKER_00: Money could not restore the decades they lost, but the government was finally acknowledging what had happened to them.
32:09
SPEAKER_00: And through every twist in this investigation were four families who had already endured the unimaginable.
32:17
SPEAKER_00: Jennifer and Sarah's family lost two daughters in one night.
32:23
SPEAKER_00: Amy's family lost their thirteen year old daughter.
32:27
SPEAKER_00: Eliza's family lost a seventeen year old daughter and sister.
32:31
SPEAKER_00: Then came more than three decades of uncertainty arrests, trials, convictions, appeals, overturned convictions, DNA that didn't have a match.
32:47
SPEAKER_00: And finally, another sixteen years waiting for that unknown DNA profile to have a name.
32:53
SPEAKER_00: Austin waited with them.
32:55
SPEAKER_00: People who'd been teenagers when the girls died grew up and had teenagers of their own.
33:01
SPEAKER_00: But they remembered the white ribbons, the candlelight march, and the billboards asking, who killed these girls?
33:10
SPEAKER_00: Now, finally, they know.
33:12
SPEAKER_00: But there are still questions that will probably never be answered.
33:17
SPEAKER_00: We don't know why Bruchiers chose Jennifer, Sarah, Eliza, and Amy.
33:23
SPEAKER_00: We don't know whether he'd been washing the yogurt shop, deliberately targeted it, or simply happened upon the girls that night.
33:31
SPEAKER_00: And because Brassiers died in 1999, there will never be a trial.
33:36
SPEAKER_00: The families will never get to watch him answer for what he did.
33:40
SPEAKER_00: But after nearly 34 years, they finally know who did it.
33:45
SPEAKER_00: Jennifer Harbison and Eliza Thomas would be in their early 50s today.
33:50
SPEAKER_00: Sarah Harbison would be around 50.
33:53
SPEAKER_00: And Amy Ayers would be in her late 40s.
33:56
SPEAKER_00: And I think that is important to remember because the yogurt shop murders became such an incredible mystery that it's easy to get caught up in the puzzle.
34:05
SPEAKER_00: The DNA, the false confessions, the convictions, the death sentence, the serial killer nobody saw coming, and the unbelievable fact that law enforcement crossed paths with him less than 48 hours after the murders occurred and had absolutely no idea.
34:25
SPEAKER_00: But none of those things are the reason this story matters.
34:29
SPEAKER_00: This story matters because four girls were supposed to leave a yogurt shop together on a Friday night.
34:36
SPEAKER_00: Jennifer was supposed to finish her shift, get into her blue Chevy pickup, and drive everybody home.
34:43
SPEAKER_00: But she never did.
34:45
SPEAKER_00: For nearly 34 years, Austin asked one question.
34:51
SPEAKER_00: Who killed these girls?
34:54
SPEAKER_00: At different points, police thought they knew, prosecutors thought they knew, and juries thought they knew.
35:01
SPEAKER_00: One innocent teenager was even sentenced to die because everyone thought they'd finally gotten it right.
35:08
SPEAKER_00: But ultimately, the truth didn't come from an interrogation room, it came from the evidence.
35:15
SPEAKER_00: A cartridge case sitting in a drain, DNA preserved for decades, and biological evidence recovered from beneath the fingernails of a 13-year-old girl who fought for her life.
35:29
SPEAKER_00: In 2025, that evidence finally had a name.
35:34
SPEAKER_00: Robert Eugene Brashears.
35:37
SPEAKER_00: And in 2026, four other men finally had their names cleared.
35:42
SPEAKER_00: Michael Scott, Robert Springsteen, Forrest Wellburn, Maurice Pierce.
35:49
SPEAKER_00: And there is not a perfectly satisfying ending to this one, y'all.
35:54
SPEAKER_00: Brashears died without ever answering for what he did.
35:58
SPEAKER_00: There will never be a trial or a sentence, and there are questions about that night that will probably never be answered.
36:08
SPEAKER_00: Most importantly, Jennifer, Sarah, Eliza, and Amy are still gone.
36:14
SPEAKER_00: But Austin promised in 1992 that it would not forget them.
36:20
SPEAKER_00: And it didn't.
36:22
SPEAKER_00: It took almost 34 years.
36:24
SPEAKER_00: But finally, these four girls have their truth.
36:29
SPEAKER_00: Jennifer Harbison, Sarah Harbison, Eliza Thomas, Amy Ayers.
36:35
SPEAKER_00: And that is the very tragic story of the yogurt shot murders.
36:40
SPEAKER_00: Final thoughts?
36:41
SPEAKER_01: Maurice Pierce unfortunately passed before getting his name cleared.
36:46
SPEAKER_01: And I'm happy for his family that his name was cleared, but it does also seem kind of tragic that the confrontation with the police that ended his life was all because of the trauma that he'd had.
36:55
SPEAKER_00: Essentially, yeah.
36:56
SPEAKER_00: His wife said on the documentary that since all that happened, he had PTSD basically and was terrified of cops.
37:02
SPEAKER_00: Just horrified.
37:04
SPEAKER_01: Which is how he ended up shot over a traffic incident.
37:07
SPEAKER_01: I I just hate for him that he didn't get to see his name cleared in person.
37:11
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
37:12
SPEAKER_00: Um But at least his family has their closure now, and you know, they have their settlement.
37:18
SPEAKER_00: And I hope that that brings them some kind of closure or whatever you want to call it.
37:24
SPEAKER_00: I hope that it helps them in some way.
37:27
SPEAKER_01: And there are a bunch of other things I want to discuss, but I think it's just gonna make a really good after show.
37:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I have like three papers.
37:33
SPEAKER_00: I bet you do.
37:35
SPEAKER_00: All right.
37:36
SPEAKER_00: Well right, you guys, we are recording um on Wednesday, and it is 7.53 p.m.
37:44
SPEAKER_00: And Big Brother comes on at 8.
37:46
SPEAKER_00: So we gotta wrap it up.
37:47
SPEAKER_00: We gotta run.
37:49
SPEAKER_00: But subscribers, we will see you in the after show.
37:52
SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, we will be back next Friday with another case.
37:56
SPEAKER_00: And until then, be divas.
37:58
SPEAKER_00: Not deadly.
38:00
SPEAKER_00: Bye.
38:00
SPEAKER_00: Bye.