Police in Texas on Monday outlined at a news conference how they linked a man connected to homicides in other states to the 1991 unsolved killings of four teenage girls at an Austin yogurt shop, saying DNA evidence led to a “significant breakthrough” in the brutal crime that has haunted the state’s capital and stumped investigators for decades.
Austin police said DNA tests resubmitted in June led investigators to Robert Eugene Brashers, who died by suicide in 1999 during a standoff in Missouri with law enforcement. He has since then been linked to several killings and rape in other states.
The murders stunned Texas’ capital city and became known as one of the area’s most notorious crimes. Austin police investigators and prosecutors had stumbled over the case for years as they waded through thousands of leads, several false confessions and badly damaged evidence from the burned-out crime scene.
The linking of Brashers to the crimes was first announced Friday.
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 in the Dec. 6, 1991 crime.
“I’m full of gratitude. It has been so long,” Barbara Wilson, mother of the Harbison girls, said at Monday’s news conference.
Investigators have said that around closing time, someone entered the store through the back door, attacked the girls and set the fire. The bodies were found when firefighters were still battling the blaze.
The victims of the Austin yogurt shop murders are shown from a photo from a social media post of a Facebook page dedicated to the unsolved crime. Clockwise from top left, the victims were Amy Ayers, Eliza Thomas, Jennifer Harbison and Sarah Harbison. (Facebook/CBC)
The autopsy report suggested the horror of the attack: their hands were tied with underwear and mouths were gagged with cloth. Ayers was shot twice.
Daniel Jackson, cold case detective, said that there was evidence Ayers fought back, with DNA collected under her fingernails integral in zeroing in on the suspect.
“Amy’s final moments on this earth were to solve this case for us,” said Jackson. “It’s because of her fighting back.”
Sonora Thomas, Eliza’s sister, expressed thanks for the “million kindnesses” from members of the Austin community but said “our reality hasn’t changed” amid this week’s revelation.
“We have been robbed of a life of nieces and nephews and grandchildren, and with sisters to grow old with,” she said.Â
In 1999, authorities arrested four men on murder charges, all of whom had been 15 to 17 years old at the time of the homicides. Two of them, Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott, initially confessed after hours-long interrogations and implicated each other.
But both men quickly recanted and said their statements were made under pressure by police.
Still, both were tried and convicted. Initially Springsteen was sent to death row, but his sentence was then reduced to life in prison.
Their convictions were overturned and they were set for retrial a decade later.
There was no physical evidence linking any of the four young men to the shop, and a judge ordered Springsteen and Scott freed in 2009 when prosecutors said new DNA tests that weren’t available in 1991 had revealed another male suspect.
Violent crimes in multiple states
Brashers was convicted in the shooting of a woman in Florida in 1985, serving four years of a 10-year prison sentence. After committing a series of crimes in Georgia, he was sentenced to a four-year term but was released after one year, not long before the Austin murders.
After his body was exhumed, Missouri authorities in 2018 implicated Brashers in the 1998 killing of Sherri Scherer and her daughter, Megan, in their home near Portageville, about 250 kilometres southeast of St. Louis. In that case, police said Brashers sexually assaulted the 12-year-old victim.
The police investigation also connected him to the 1990 killing of Genevieve Zitricki, a 28-year-old found beaten and strangled in her bathtub in Greenville, S.C., as well as the rape of a 14-year-old girl in Memphis, Tenn., in 1997.
Jackson said his history was of a dangerous, armed individual who committed his crimes alone. There’s no evidence to date he had an accomplice in Austin, he said.
Officials on Monday said they don’t know why Brashers was in Austin, but they said he was stopped by Customs and Border Patrol in El Paso 48 hours after the yogurt shop murders. He was in possession of the firearm that only later was connected to the four homicides.
They also said a .380-calibre casing from their crime scene also matches bullet fragments from an unsolved Kentucky homicide. Officials in Kentucky have not yet concluded their probe in that killing yet.
Brashers’s daughter, in interviews with local news stations, expressed surprise and sorrow upon learning about the latest deaths linked to her father.
Deborah Brashers-Claunch told KVUE-TV that she was just an infant when the Austin murders happened. She told KXAN-TV that she didn’t know why he ended up in Austin, other than to note that he worked in construction. Â
“I am very sorry to every family that my father hurt,” Brashers-Claunch told the Austin station. Â
The announcement came amid renewed attention on the case with the release last month of The Yogurt Shop Murders, an HBO documentary series.