The 1991 murder of four teenage girls at a yogurt shop in Austin, Texas, confounded investigators and haunted the city for more than 30 years — until this week, when police said modern DNA investigative methods had helped them to at last identify a suspect.
The girls had been bound, gagged and set on fire inside the shop I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! on a commercial street in Austin, and the case came to be known as the Yogurt shop murders.
In a statement on Friday, the city of Austin said its police department had named Robert Eugene Brashers as a suspect. Mr. Brashers died by suicide in 1999, days after shooting himself during a standoff with police.
“Austin Police have made a significant breakthrough,” said the statement on the city’s website. “For almost 34 years they have worked tirelessly and remained committed to solving this case for the families” of the four girls, the city said. “We have identified a suspect in these murders through a wide range of DNA testing.”
The Austin Police Department said it would not offer more information on the case until Monday. The outcome of its investigation was first reported this weekend by The Austin American-Statesman.
Eliza Thomas, 17, and Jennifer Harbison, 17, had been working at the yogurt store on the night of Dec. 6, 1991. A friend, Amy Ayers, 13, and Jennifer’s 15-year-old sister, Sarah, had come to meet them there.
Their bodies were discovered early the next morning. They were found only after firefighters, who were called to the scene shortly before midnight to put out a two-alarm fire, extinguished the flames.
The four girls had been stripped, bound with their own clothing and shot in the head. At least two of them had been sexually assaulted. The bodies of three of the girls were piled in a back room, where they had been covered with Styrofoam cups. Someone had poured lighter fluid and lit them on fire.
Mr. Brashers was not the focus of the initial investigation, and the authorities originally thought that there had been more than one assailant.
The murders left the city on edge, even though Austin had a relatively low crime rate for its size.
Police were said to have chased down thousands of leads that led nowhere. The investigation was hindered by the lack of physical evidence, most of which had been destroyed by the flames or by firefighters in their effort to put out the blaze.
Noting there was evidence of rape, coroners gathered a small amount of DNA evidence from the girls’ bodies. Using technology available at the time, only one person was positively identified — a boyfriend, whom the police ruled out as a suspect.
Then in 1999, a task force led by the Austin Police Department arrested four men, who had been teenagers at the time of the murders and were questioned and released at the time for lack of evidence, The Austin American-Stateman reported. Two of them were convicted, but an appeals court overturned the guilty verdicts.
In 2007, in preparing for a new trial against the men, prosecutors performed tests using new technology on the DNA samples from the body of Ms. Ayer. The results did not match any suspects, setting back the investigation once again and frustrating Austin residents who had been hoping for a resolution.
The city confirmed on Friday that DNA testing led police to discover the suspect’s identity, and the Austin American-Statesman reported that investigators used genetic genealogy to link the same man to at least three other murders. The investigative method consists of inputting the genetic profile of a suspected assailant into an online genealogy database to find direct matches or relatives. The method produced a breakthrough in 2018, when police used it to name the Golden State Killer.
A retired Austin Police Detective also told CBS News on Friday that a bullet casing found in a drain at the yogurt shop matched the gun that he said Mr. Brashers used to shoot himself more than two decades ago.
“We will not forget” became a rallying cry for the city in the aftermath of the murders, The New York Times reported in 1992. The parents of the sisters who were killed became public figures, and all four girls were commemorated at public schools, at a rodeo, with a parade float, and with the establishment of a scholarship fund.
The yogurt shop is long gone, but a plaque in Austin honors the girls’ memory.
Aishvarya Kavi works in the Washington bureau of The Times, helping to cover a variety of political and national news.
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