At the end of HBO’s “The Yogurt Shop Murders,” an absorbing four-episode documentary about a very cold case — the 1991 killing of four teenage girls in an Austin, Texas, strip mall — Sonora Thomas, the sister of one of the victims, talked about how it could help survivors to “tell the story over and over again.”
It was a statement about trauma and memory. It also could serve as a rationalization for the invasive spread of the true-crime documentary series.
In this case, though, everyone had the story wrong. “The Yogurt Shop Murders” ended its run on HBO in late August 2025; just a month later, the police announced that they had finally identified a suspect. He was a roaming serial killer, Robert Eugene Brashers, dead for decades, who had never been mentioned in the series. The cop who would break the case had been interviewed onscreen, but at that point he had not yet homed in on Brashers.
Sometimes, as with “Serial” or “Making a Murderer” or HBO’s “The Jinx,” true-crime TV entwines itself with real-life justice. This wasn’t that. Instead of anticipating or influencing the investigation, “The Yogurt Shop Murders” was made and broadcast just in time to be scooped by it.
But what might have seemed like a reversal was actually just another step in the story the series was telling. “The Yogurt Shop Murders” was less about who was responsible for the killings than about the toll that uncertainty took on everyone involved — the victims’ families, the various suspects over the years, the investigators, the Austin community — and how the true-crime storytellers drawn to that uncertainty both assuaged and amplified peoples’ pain. Rather than flipping the script, the sudden identification of Brashers was an opportunity to revisit those themes.
The series’s director, Margaret Brown, does that in a new, fifth episode, titled “The End of Wondering,” now streaming on HBO Max. As she did throughout the series, she neatly sums up the details of the investigation. The Austin cold-case detective Dan Jackson is a classic no-nonsense cop, and his explanation of how he used shell casings and the latest DNA tech to solve the case is excellent TV.
He is contrasted, implicitly, with the former homicide detective Paul Johnson, whose interrogations helped elicit false confessions that put two young men in prison, one on death row. Interviewed again for the new episode, Johnson talks about being “fooled” and shifts blame to the young men and to other investigators.
The most moving moments in the episode, though, leave the investigation behind and return to the province of memory. A grizzled, white-haired man gives a quietly devastating account of having supervised the demolition of the yogurt shop, which had been set on fire by the killer with the girls’ bodies still inside.
Thomas, a younger sister of the 17-year-old victim Eliza Thomas, and John Jones, a detective whose life was warped by the case, meet by chance at an impromptu memorial that springs up at the strip mall after the news breaks about Brashers. “Thirty-four years,” Jones says as they embrace. They politely stand aside as others come to pay tribute or to gawk. “If we stay here long enough, we’re going to meet all kinds of people,” Thomas says.
At this point, most of those people will know about the case because of true-crime TV. Before Brown made “The Yogurt Shop Murders,” the killings had been covered at least six times by “48 Hours”; Erin Moriarty, a correspondent for that show, is a major character in the documentary series. Brown benefited from footage shot by another filmmaker, Claire Huie, who never finished her own documentary about the case. “The Yogurt Shop Murders” is like a layered collage of material created by Brown, Huie, tabloid TV and local and national news — a true-crime scrapbook.
Thomas, who grew up to become a mental health counselor, said in the original series that she saw how “this strange genre of crime shows doesn’t just provide fodder for the curious, it also provides an outlet for victims to tell a story that no one wants to hear.”
That thought resonates with the new episode’s most stunning, and perhaps most representative, sequence. A series of the victims’ family members are asked what they think now about Michael Scott and Robert Springsteen, the two men who confessed, were wrongly convicted and spent about nine years in prison. In the original series they had all firmly, angrily agreed that the men were guilty, even after their convictions were overturned.
The answer now, in each case: Nothing. Scott’s and Springsteen’s suffering is the story these family members don’t want to hear. The mother of the victims Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, who were 17 and 15, says: “I’ve already been through a lot. I don’t want to take that on.” The brother of Amy Ayers, who was 13, says, “I don’t think about it,” then blames the young men, adding, “They didn’t put themselves there, but they kind of did.”
A serial killer who killed himself in a standoff with police in 1999, Brashers is a figure of pure, abstract evil; he cannot provide the closure or the sense of justice done that the families — and the purveyors of true crime — require. Just as he ended the lives of the four girls in 1991 without being caught, he has now ended their story without becoming part of it. The story has been told too many times to change now.
Mike Hale is a television critic for The Times. He also writes about online video, film and media.
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