Austin yogurt shop murders: A timeline of the long road from cold case to a DNA match<\/a><\/p>\n\u201cRobert Eugene Brashers was never in the yogurt shop case files,\u201d Jackson said from the witness stand Thursday.<\/p>\n
Given the steps investigators now believe he took to conceal his identity and movements, his absence from the file underscores how effectively he avoided scrutiny.<\/p>\n
The right man for the job<\/p>\n
After Thursday\u2019s hearing, Dennis Farris \u2014 an officer who worked the 1991 crime scene and now serves as president of the Austin Police Retired Officers Association \u2014 described Detective Jackson as the \u201cperfect\u201d detective to lead the cold case review.<\/p>\n
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Jackson\u2019s path to\u00a0homicide investigator was unconventional. He holds a master\u2019s degree in anthropology and joined the Travis County Medical Examiner\u2019s Office in 2005 as a forensic investigator. Over nine years, he authored more than 4,000 forensic reports and developed expertise in analyzing skeletal remains.<\/p>\n
He left the medical examiner\u2019s office in 2014 to join the Austin Police Department, was promoted to detective in 2020 and transferred to the cold case unit in 2022.<\/p>\n
On his first day there, he was handed the yogurt shop file.<\/p>\n
When beginning his investigation, he said he made a point of not watching videos of the interrogations that led to the false confessions of the men exonerated Thursday.<\/p>\n
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“I didn’t want to put myself in a position where I had a confirmation bias,” Jackson said.<\/p>\n
Three years later, decisions he made about renewed forensic testing would identify a brand new suspect \u2014 and bring long-delayed resolution to one of Austin\u2019s most haunting crimes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Austin Police Department Cold Case Detective Daniel Jackson arrives at the exoneration hearing for four men wrongfully accused…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":175031,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,134,133,815,251,27,70633,69028],"class_list":{"0":"post-175030","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-austin","8":"tag-austin","9":"tag-austin-headlines","10":"tag-austin-news","11":"tag-courts","12":"tag-local-news","13":"tag-texas","14":"tag-yogurt-shop-murder-exonerations","15":"tag-yogurt-shop-murders"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175030"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175030\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/175031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}