On the night of December sixth, nineteen ninety one, just before midnight, a patrol officer driving through northwest Austin, Texas noticed smoke seeping from the roofline of a small frozen yogurt shop.

Fire crews responded quickly, prying open the front door and pushing back the flames.

The fire was small enough to contain, but what they found at the rear of the shop froze them where they stood.

Fourteenage girls had been bound, shot, and set on fire.

The victims were seventeen year old Jennifer Harbison and her best friend, seventeen year old Eliza Thomas, both employees that had been closing the I can't believe it's yogurt store that night.

Jennifer's younger sister, Sarah, just fifteen, had stopped by to catch a ride home.

Along with her was Sarah's best friend, thirteen year old Amy Ayers.

But should have been an ordinary Friday night shift turned into a crime that would shape the reputation of Austin for decades.

The brutality of the crime itself was staggering.

The four girls had been forced to undress and were bound with their own clothing.

Each had been shot in the head.

Three bodies were stacked together, the fourth placed just a few feet away.

The fire was deliberately set in an attempt to erase evidence, but it only partially did the job.

Investigators noted that the back door had been left unlocked and more than five hundred dollars was missing from the cash register.

The machine's last entry was a no sale at eleven o three pm.

Arson investigators estimated the fire was set at around eleven forty two that men who ever carried out the crime and lingered inside for close to an hour.

Witnesses from the yogurt shop that evening were called unsettling details.

A security professional noticed a fidgety young man in a green military style jacket near closing.

A couple who stopped for yogurt saw two men seated closest to the register.

None of those leads, however, produced much clarity.

In the wake of the crime, Austin was horrified.

Detectives, with help from the FBI, created a profile suggesting at least two offenders.

They believed the killers were familiar with the neighborhood and likely had some history with Arson, but the caves quickly spiraled into a labyrinth.

Investigators chased theories about local robberies, drug connections, even possible cult involvement.

The city's brush with the national Satanic panic of the early nineteen nineties meant alternative subcultures in Austin suddenly found themselves interrogated.

None of that led to any arrest.

What did follow was a flood of false confessions, more than fifty in all, many obtained under questionable circumstances.

One lead came just eight days after the crime.

Sixteen year old Maurice Pierce was arrested at the nearby North Cross Mall with a twenty two caliber pistol in his waistband.

He implicated three of his friends, Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, and Forrest Welborn.

At the time, investigators dismissed his story, but years later it would return with enormous consequences.

By nineteen ninety nine, nearly a decade later, the case had stalled, Austin police began circling back to Maurice Pearce and his friends.

They obtained videotaped confessions from Springsteen and Scott, each blaming the other.

Prosecutors charged all four men with involvement.

Forrest Welborne was never indicted, but both Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott were eventually convicted.

Springsteen received death sentence in two thousand one, Scott life in prison in two thousand two.

Maurice Pearce, cast as the ringleader, had his charges dismissed in two thousand three, mainly because the evidence never held up.

In two thousand, ETF experts had concluded that Pierce's revolver was not the murder weapon, a fact that the Austin police had actually known months earlier.

Questions about interrogation practices also undermined the case.

A photograph from Scott's videotaped confession showed a detective pressing a gun to his head, a stunning image that eroded all credibility following their cavictions.

Appeals followed the U.

S.

Supreme Court's ruling in Crawford v.

Washington, which reinforced the right of defendants to confront their accusers, gutted the way confessions had been used at trial.

Advanced DNA testing in two thousand and eight and two thousand nine revealed multiple unknown male contributors from the crime scene, including a partial ystr lineage profile in DNA beneath Amyre's fingernails, then if it matched the four young men that had been accused by two thousand and nine, prosecutors dropped charges and Springsteen and Scott were freed.

Maurice Pierce was killed in an unrelated police encounter in twenty ten after resisting arrest during a traffic stop.

Forrest Wellborne receded from public life, never publicly addressing his role in the case.

For the families of the four victims and for Austin, Texas in general, the crime remained devastatingly unresolved until just recently.

In the summer of twenty twenty five, premiered a four part documentary series titled The Yogurt Shop Murders.

It brought the case back into the national conversation, revisiting the horror of the crime itself and the failures of the following investigation.

The series did what many documentaries hope to do.

It reignited attention.

In the wake of this documentary series airing, Austin police convened a multi agency review of the case.

Detectives, forensic scientists, and outside experts began coming through every scrap of retained evidence.

Advances in genetic analysis and ballistics technology meant that the items two degraded or insignificant in nineteen ninety one could now be tested again decades later.

Police also leaned on national resources that had matured in the intervening decades, including the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network or NIBBIN, which links shillcasings from crimes across the country.

The renewed investigation was methodical rather than sudden.

Detectives did not stumble upon a miraculous new clue.

Instead, it was the low accumulation of evidence genetic, ballistic, geographic, replicated across labs and double checked against databases, and this time the results converged.

The turning point lay in DNA.

When the original case had collapsed back in two thousand and nine, investigators already had fragments, including a YSTR lineage profile, and partial profiles that excluded the Ford defendants.

They believed this was an end to their case, but in reality it should have compelled them to begin.

Anew YSTR, which follows the male line of inheritance, is valuable for identifying a family line, but cannot pinpoint a single individual.

In their new twenty twenty five review, laboratories used cutting edge kits designed for degraded or low quality DNA samples.

They re examined retained swabs and cuttings with contamination controls more rigorous than anything available in the early nineteen nineties.

Replication across independent labs confirmed consistent male dans DA beneath Amy Ayre's fingernails.

The ystr lineage was redrawn and compared against other cases.

A laboratory in South Carolina reported a correlation between the Austin profile and a sexual assault and murder committed there in nineteen ninety That case was already linked to a man named Robert Eugene Brashers.

At the same time, Austin investigators revisited the ballistic evidence.

Among the items collected back in nineteen ninety one was a three eighty casing found in a drain near the yogurt shop.

Entered into NIBBIN, the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network.

It produced a correlation to a firearm tied to a homicide just outside of Texas, a case already associated with Robert Brashers.

The DNA and ballistics pointed in the same direction.

Investigators then pursued one to one confirmation Brashers had actually died back in nineteen ninety nine, but his remains had previously been exhumed in connection with other cold cases.

From those remains, investigators obtained his DNA and compared it directly to the Austin samples.

The profiles matched the DNA found under Amy Ayer's fingernails and the YSQR lineage, both aligned with Brashers.

The three eighty ksing linked to a gun known to have been his.

Forensic genealogy and hard lab science had converged on the same name.

Robert Eugene Brashers was already infamous among cold case investigators.

Born in nineteen fifty eight, he had a long criminal record, stretching across several states.

In nineteen eighty five, he was convicted of attempted murder in Florida.

After his release from custody, his crimes escalated.

He was later implicated in assaults and homicides in South Carolina, Missouri, and Arkansas.

His pattern involved sexual assault, binding of victims, and occasional efforts to destroy evidence with fire.

Brashers led a double life.

Outwardly, he presented as a husband and father, moving frequently but maintaining the veneer of stability In secret, he committed predatory violence.

He was intelligent, mobile, and comfortable with weapons.

In January nineteen ninety nine, as police prepared to arrest him in Missouri for unrelated crimes, he barricaded himself in a motel and died by suicide.

By the time Austin police identified him, he had been dead for more than twenty five years.

What makes him fit the yogurt shop case is not just the DNA or the ballistics, but the way these scientific signals aligned with his established pattern.

He was capable of both sexual assault and lethal violence.

He sometimes used fire to destroy evidence.

He moved through the South in the years leading up to nineteen ninety one, and investigators belief he could have pausibly been in Austin at the time of the murders.

For the families of the four victims, the identification of Robert Brasher's as their daughter's potential killer mixed with sorrow.

After thirty four years, there is finally a credible answer to the question of who, But there will never be any trial, no cross examination of sentencing.

Justice in the formal sense is impossible when the suspect is already dead.

What remains is the truth supported by science, which can hopefully finally give families something to hold on to for the men once convicted of this crime, the identification is vindication.

The DNA exclusions already showed they were not responsible, but the naming of Brashers proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that someone else was likely responsible.

The prosecutions of nineteen ninety nine were a devastating mistake, built on cowerst confessions and flawed investigative logic.

That mistake consumed a decade of two men's lives and left scars that remained today.

The identification of Brashers highlights just how wrong those prosecutions were.

For the case itself, Austin police emphasized that it technically remains open.

While the evidence points squarely at Robert Brascher's, investigators continue to explore whether anyone else was involved.

Earlier DNA testing had suggested multiple unknown male profiles.

Some witnesses remembered two men in the shop near closing.

It remains possible, though unproven, that Brashers had helped that night.

Police say they are still evaluating that question.

Authorities have noted that Brashers is connected to other crimes the South Carolina.

Sexual assault and murder that produced the ystr correlation is one of them.

The homicide associated with the three eighty shell casing as another.

Reporters have pointed out that his methods sexual assault, binding, and sometimes arson align with the yogurt shop murders.

While officials are cautious about drawing firm connections beyond what is confirmed, it is likely that Robert Brascher's was responsible for multiple unsolved cases across the South.

The yogurt shop murders now fit into a larger pattern of violence that spanned decades.

The identification of Robert Eugene Brashers as the likely killer of Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, Eliza Thomas, and Amy Years is as close to a resolution as this case may ever see.

Brashers is dead, having taken the coward's way out a quarter century ago, so there will be no trial.

The families will never see him face judgment in a court room.

But police and forensic experts believe that the science is clear.

DNA from beneath Amy Year's fingernails the y stre lineage pointing to his family line in the ballistics correlation from a three eighty shellcasing together paint a coherent picture.

The case remains technically unsolved, with investigators considering the possibility of an accomplice, but the central question of who killed these four girls in Austin in nineteen ninety one appears to finally have an answer.

The four men, once prosecuted, are now firmly out of the frame.

Their convictions, already vacated, are now publicly and scientifically discredited.

It is impossible to ignore that the key evidence in this case, the three eighty showcasing in the DNA beneath Amiare's fingernails, was never hidden.

Both were collected back in nineteen eighty one.

They sat in evidence lockers through trial after trial, through conviction and appeal, through years when men sat in prison for a crime the biology did not support the science to analyze this evidence fully did not exist at the start of the case, But the decision to rely on cowerced confessions rather than wait for better tools was human, not technical.

Families have waited thirty four years for this answer, and part of that weight is owed to choices that investigators made, to leads they mishandled, and to evidence that was left to gather dust, that truth should stand alongside the relief of finally having a name for Austin, a city that lost its sense of safety that winter night.

The answer comes late, but it still comes.

Fire and time tried to obscure the truth, but not every scrap of evidence.

Burned with science and persistence, they have been brought back in a focus.

The murders may never reach the courtroom resolution that the families once hoped for, but they no longer rest in the realm of mystery, while the finer details of the story remain buried in ash and decades lost.

The story of the Austin yogurt shot murders and the four victims may finally be at least partially resolved.