The director Margaret Brown thought her docuseries \u201cThe Yogurt Shop Murders\u201d was largely behind her when its fourth and, at that time, final episode aired last August on HBO. She had spent years working on the story, about the unsolved 1991 murders of four teenage girls in Austin, Texas. And the work had taken a toll.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was very na\u00efve, when I took the job,\u201d she said last week on a video call. \u201cI didn\u2019t understand the kind of emotional space it would put me in for three and a half years.\u201d<\/p>\n
She didn\u2019t anticipate that only weeks later, an explosive announcement would change everything. Nor did she imagine that her work would factor into the newest chapter, which she then scrambled to film. That chapter, titled \u201cThe End of Wondering,\u201d debuts Friday night on HBO.<\/p>\n
The first four episodes presented a haunting portrait of the protracted suffering such a horrific, seemingly random unsolved crime can inflict on a community. When Brown accepted the project, she wasn\u2019t focused on solving the case, she said. She had wanted instead to explore how people handle such extraordinary trauma and grief.<\/p>\n
But the sense of mission shifted when Detective Dan Jackson of the Austin Police Department\u2019s cold case homicide unit, who was assigned the case in 2022, solved the murders, linking them definitively to a serial killer and rapist who had committed similar crimes across the country before eventually killing himself.<\/p>\n
Suddenly Brown and her team found themselves hustling to tell a story unfolding in real time, a growing trend in the true-crime genre. Her tale of justice deferred became one of resolution and vindication.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is just the strangest coincidence,\u201d Jackson said by video call about the timing. \u201cBut it\u2019s appropriate for this case \u2014 of how weird this case is \u2014 that all of a sudden there\u2019s a documentary and then it gets solved a month later.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Yogurt Shop Murders, as they\u2019ve long been called, sent shock waves through Austin, a city with a very different energy in 1991 and half the current population \u2014 what Brown called \u201ca lost time.\u201d Amy Ayers, 13; Eliza Thomas, 17; and the sisters Jennifer, 17, and Sarah Harbison, 15, were killed at the frozen yogurt shop where Thomas and Jennifer Harbison worked. All four girls were shot in the head. At least three of them were raped, and the shop was set ablaze.<\/p>\n
Four teenage boys were wrongly accused of the crimes \u2014 more young victims of another kind. Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott gave false confessions under aggressive police interrogation; both were convicted of murder (Springsteen in 2001; Scott in 2002). Maurice Pierce and Forrest Welborn were charged and never convicted, but each spent significant time in jail.<\/p>\n
Scott\u2019s and Springsteen\u2019s convictions were eventually overturned because of a Sixth Amendment violation<\/a>, and the men were freed in 2009. (In February, a Texas judge declared all four men<\/a> \u201cactually innocent.\u201d) Pierce, who spent three years in jail awaiting trial, was killed by the police during a 2010 traffic stop, after injuring an officer with a knife.<\/p>\n The new episode opens at a news conference from Sept. 29, 2025, in which Jackson identifies Robert Eugene Brashers as the yogurt shop killer. He died by suicide in 1999 during a police standoff.<\/p>\n Brown, who lives in Austin, was at that news conference with her crew, anticipating big news. She and Detective Jackson had become good friends during the production of her docuseries, and the two had met for coffee shortly after Aug. 24, when Episode 4 aired. She detected a shift in his demeanor.<\/p>\n \u201cShe goes, \u2018You\u2019re fidgety,\u2019\u201d Jackson recalled. \u201cI knew we had solved it. We just weren\u2019t 100 percent yet.\u201d<\/p>\n He wasn\u2019t going to divulge any details prematurely at the time. \u201cI could tell he wanted to tell me something, but he felt morally obligated to not,\u201d Brown said, \u201cand I wanted to honor that.\u201d<\/p>\n But when she asked him directly if she was going to need an Episode 5, Jackson said, \u201cI was like, \u2018Yes.\u2019\u201d He had a solid lead, he told her, but suggested it could take weeks, even months, to confirm it.<\/p>\n She left Austin for her next project. Then just days after that coffee, Jackson had his answer. He suggested she come quickly, and Brown hurried back.<\/p>\n Jackson had identified Brashers, the result of a concerted effort across multiple states to match DNA and ballistic evidence, combined with work from the genetic genealogist Cece Moore<\/a>.<\/p>\n