Police outline how DNA, ballistics evidence led to dead man as likely killer of girls in yogurt shop

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AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Two days after four teenage girls were found murdered in a burning Austin yogurt shop in 1991, a man with a pistol in a stolen car was arrested at a border checkpoint west of El Paso.

Nearly 34 years later, cold case detectives have now connected that man and the weapon to the horrific killings that stunned Texas' capital city. The case frustrated investigators for decades and previously led to the convictions of two men who were sent to prison, one of them to death row.

Investigators on Monday outlined how advanced DNA testing technology and a fresh look at old ballistics testing from the crime scene, led them to to identify Robert Eugene Brashers as the likely killer. Brashers, who died in 1999 when he shot himself in a standoff with police in 1999, has been linked to similar violent crimes in multiple other states.

“Austin lost its innocence the night those young souls became victims. ... Today was a long time coming,” Austin Mayor Kirk Watson said at a news conference attended by several members of the victims' families, where police outlined the rapid cascade of new evidence that developed over the past few months.

The announcement that Brashers was the suspect came amid renewed attention on the case with the release last month of “The Yogurt Shop Murders,” an HBO documentary series.

On Dec. 6, 1991, Amy Ayers, 13; Eliza Thomas, 17; and sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, ages 17 and 15, were bound, gagged and shot in the head at the “I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt” store where two of them worked. The building was then set on fire.

Investigators have said that around closing time, someone was either in the store or entered through the back door, attacked the girls and set the fire. The bodies were found by firefighters who were still battling the blaze, and the efforts to put out the fire badly damaged the crime scene.

Detectives chased thousands of leads, including multiple confessions, before the case went cold for years. Then in 1999, police arrested four men who were juveniles at the time of the crime. Two of them, Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott, confessed and implicated each other, but later recanted and said their statements were coerced by police.

Springsteen and Scott were convicted. Springsteen was sent to death row before the sentence was reduced to life in prison. Both convictions were later overturned, and the charges were dropped in 2009 when new DNA evidence told detectives they were looking for a previously unknown male at the crime scene.

Authorities had identified Brashers as a killer who left a deadly trail across several states before he was connected to the yogurt shop murders.

In 2018, Missouri authorities said DNA evidence linked him to the strangulation of a South Carolina woman in 1990, and the shooting of a mother and daughter in Missouri in 1998. The evidence also connected Brashers to the 1997 rape of a 14-year-old girl in Tennessee.

In June, Austin cold case detective Daniel Jackson resubmitted to a federal system the ballistics findings on a shell casing from a .380 caliber handgun taken from the yogurt shop that was used to kill Ayers. It came back as a match to an unsolved 1998 crime in Kentucky. Jackson would not detail the Kentucky case but said it has similarities to the crime in Austin.

And in August, South Carolina officials told Austin detectives that advanced DNA tests on a sample taken from under Ayers' fingernail came back as a match to Brashers from the 1990 murder in South Carolina.

“Amy’s final moments on this Earth were to solve this case for us,” Jackson said. “It’s because of her fighting back.”

Police said they don't know why Brashers would have been in Austin the night of the murders but noted the stop near El Paso just two days later. He was driving to visit his father in Arizona in a truck reported stolen in Georgia. He tried to flee when stopped, but was eventually detained and arrested on charges of auto theft and being a felon in possession of a firearm.

The gun found on Brashers that day was confiscated, but it was eventually returned to his father, who may have given it back to him. Jackson said the gun is the same .380 caliber make and model Brashers used it to kill himself in the standoff with police in 1999 in Missouri.

Police said the case remains open for now and asked for help from anyone who could connect Brashers to Austin at the time. Brashers could be a suspect in other unsolved killings, Jackson said.

Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza said the “overwhelming weight of the evidence points to the guilt of one man" and the innocence of the men previously arrested and convicted.

“If the conclusions of APD’s investigation are confirmed, as it appears that they will be, I will say: I am sorry, though I know that that will never be enough,” Garza said.

“This case stole decades of my life, but the truth has finally come to light,” Scott said in a statement issued by his attorney, who said Scott deserves a full exoneration.

“It must happen very soon. This is a long, hard battle for justice,” attorney Tony Diaz said. Springsteen's trial attorney did not respond to requests for comment.

“We never wanted anyone to go to jail or be charged with anything that they didn’t do,” said Barbara Wilson, mothers of the Harbison sisters. “Vengeance was never it. It was always the truth.”

Police noted similarities in the yogurt shop case to Brasher's other crimes — including that the victims were tied up with their own clothing, sexually assaulted and some crime scenes were set on fire. Jackson also noted Brashers was known to carry multiple weapons and act alone.

“At this point there is no evidence he had an accomplice,” in the Austin killings, Jackson said.

Sonora Thomas, sister of Eliza Thomas, said she thought she would die not knowing what happened and had to come to terms with that.

“I now know what happened, and that does ease my suffering,” she said.