Texas authorities say they’ve identified the killer in the infamous Yogurt Shop Murders, featured in an HBO docuseries titled “The Yogurt Shop Murders” this summer.
Austin police say DNA has linked long-deceased Robert Eugene Brashers to the killings of four teenage girls on Dec. 6, 1991. The girls were found bound and fatally shot, and the I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt shop was set on fire. The case went unsolved for 34 years.
“Our team never gave up working this case,” said the city of Austin in a Friday statement. “For almost 34 years they have worked tirelessly and remained committed to solving this case for the families of Jennifer Harbison, Sarah Harbison, Eliza Thomas, and Amy Ayers, all innocent lives taken senselessly and far too soon.”
According to the statement, investigators have been in touch with the families of the Harbisons, Thomas and Ayers.
Brashers, born March 13, 1958, was an alleged serial killer and rapist connected to at least three other murders, two of them in Missouri. DNA linked Brashers to the murders of 38-year-old Sherri Scherer and her 12-year-old daughter Megan on March 28, 1998 in their home in Portageville, Mo.
Police believe he also murdered 28-year-old Genevieve Zitricki of Greeneville, S.C., in 1990.
The January following The Yogurt Shop Murders, Brashers died by suicide in Kennett, Mo., per the Missouri Highway Patrol. His death was preceded by a four-hour standoff with police. During the standoff, Brashers was armed with a semi-automatic pistol and he reportedly shot himself in the head.
In 2018, Brashers’ remains were exhumed pursuant to a court order, according to a Missouri State Highway Patrol press release about the resolution of the Scherer homicides. Missouri State Police said he had an extensive criminal history that included attempted murder, burglary, impersonating a police officer and unlawful possession of a weapon. He was convicted of attempted second degree murder in 1986 and was arrested for trying to break into a woman’s home in 1998.
A 2011 article by Michael Hall shared by the city of Austin said that the initial police investigation in the Yogurt Shop Murders case in Texas “was torturous, bizarre, incompetent, and heavy handed.”
Mike Scott, Robert Springsteen, Maurice Pierce, and Forrest Welborn – called “boys” in the article – were arrested for the murders in 1999. Welborn wasn’t indicted and walked free, while charges against Pierce were eventually dismissed.
Scott and Springsteen confessed and those confessions were the only evidence at their trials in 2001 and 2002, said Hall. By the time of the trials, they had both recanted their confessions and said police coerced their statements, but both were found guilty. Scott received the death penalty and Springsteen got life in prison.
“I was berated and berated and berated by the police officers. Until they obtained what it was they wanted to hear, they were not going to allow me to leave. And basically, they broke me down,” said Springsteen of the interrogations, per a 2020 article on the case from the American Bar Association.
Then, in 2006 and 2007, both of their sentences were overturned by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. In 2009, the DA dismissed all charges against them after a vaginal swab of one of the girls revealed a DNA profile that didn’t match any of the four boys initially arrested for the murders, Hall reported.
“Those boys all became men, and they have scattered all over the place,” he wrote. “Welborn lives in Lockhart and Springsteen in Charleston, West Virginia. Scott has left the state, according to one of his attorneys. And last year Pierce was shot and killed by an Austin policeman after Pierce stabbed him in the neck during a struggle. He had been disturbed since his 2003 release, believing the police were out to get him.”
Although Brashers has been identified as the perpetrator in the I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt case through a “wide range of DNA testing,” Austin said that the case remains open and that the investigation is ongoing.