More than three decades after four teenage girls were found bound, gagged and murdered inside a frozen yogurt shop in Austin, Texas, investigators and officials on Monday described years of relentless, old-fashioned detective work and advances in DNA technology that finally led them to a suspect.
Detectives processed hundreds of DNA tests and sorted through thousands of tips. Shell casings were examined and more than a dozen forensic laboratories were consulted. Samples that would help unlock the case were taken from fingernails, an ice cream scoop and a belt buckle. Crimes in other states, including Tennessee, Kentucky and South Carolina, were reviewed for possible links.
Last week, officials announced a breakthrough: They had identified a man, Robert Eugene Brashers, who they said was responsible for the murders, which had baffled detectives and haunted Texas’s capital city since 1991.
At a news conference on Monday, which relatives of the victims attended, officials said they were still investigating elements of the case, which came to be known as the yogurt shop murders. Mr. Brashers died in 1999, days after shooting himself during a standoff with the police in Missouri. He was 40 years old.
Mayor Kirk Watson of Austin said the identification of Mr. Brashers as the suspect was a “significant breakthrough” in the decades-long effort to solve a “horrible crime” that he said changed the city forever.
Austin’s police chief, Lisa Davis, called it one of the most “devastating” and “haunting” cases in the city’s history. The only physical evidence recovered from the yogurt shop has been matched to Mr. Brashers, who she said was connected to other murders and sexual assaults across the country.
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