“48 Hours” correspondent Erin Moriarty has learned a suspect has been identified in the 1991 murders of four teenage girls in an Austin, Texas, yogurt shop. This is according to one of the original investigators who worked the case.
That suspect is Robert Eugene Brashers, who is deceased, says retired Austin detective John Jones.
Brashers is a serial killer and rapist who committed at least three murders between 1990 and 1998 in the states of South Carolina and Missouri. He died in January 1999 by suicide during a standoff with police. The gun he used to shoot himself is believed to be consistent with a bullet casing found in a drain inside the yogurt shop, says Jones.
The connection between Brashers and the case was made through DNA, Jones told Moriarty.
Moriarty has reported on the yogurt shop case since the very beginning.
Inside the yogurt shop were the charred bodies of four teenage girls ranging from 13 to 17 years old. The victims, clockwise from top left: Amy Ayers, Eliza Thomas, Sarah Harbison and Jennifer Harbison.
On Dec. 6, 1991, 17-year-old Eliza Thomas, 13-year-old Amy Ayers, and two sisters, 17-year-old Jennifer Harbison and 15-year-old Sarah Harbison, were found gagged, tied up with their own clothing, and shot in the head in an I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! shop in Austin. The person responsible had also set the shop on fire, compromising much of the evidence.
Eliza and Jennifer had been working at the yogurt shop that night. They were getting ready to close when Jennifer’s sister, Sarah, and their friend, Amy, met them there to head home.
Robert Eugene Brashers / Credit: Missouri State Highway Patrol via AP
Following the crime, the Austin Police Department developed a task force dedicated solely to solving the case. Government agencies, including the FBI, were called in to assist, but the case ultimately went cold until 1999, when four men, Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Maurice Pierce and Forrest Welborn, were arrested and charged with the murders.’
The men were only teenagers at the time of the crime. They were first questioned just days after the murders when one of them, Maurice Pierce, was arrested at a mall not far from the yogurt shop with a .22 caliber gun — one of the same types of weapons believed to have been used in the killings.
All four were released back then for lack of evidence, but in 1999, when a new team of investigators were tasked with taking a fresh look at the old case, they obtained confessions from two of the four men, Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott. Those confessions would later be called into question after the two recanted, saying they were coerced.
Charges were ultimately dropped against Maurice Pierce and Forrest Welborn due to lack of evidence, and Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott were the only two to go on trial. The sole evidence against them were their own words. They were both convicted, but a few years later, their convictions were overturned on constitutional grounds. The Sixth Amendment gives defendants the right to confront accusers and in Scott and Springsteen’s trials, their confessions were used against one another, but they weren’t allowed to question each other in court.
Rosemary Lehmberg, the Travis County, Texas, district attorney at the time, was intent on retrying Springsteen and Scott. But before doing so, her office decided to take advantage of what was then a fairly new type of DNA testing called Y-STR testing. It was a way of searching for and extracting male DNA only. Y-STR testing was ordered on vaginal swabs taken from the victims at the time of the murders. By this point, investigators had come to believe that at least one of the victims had been sexually assaulted. As a result of the Y-STR testing, a partial male DNA profile was obtained from one of the girls, but to the surprise of the district attorney’s office, the DNA sample did not match any of the four men who were arrested.
Still, prosecutors were determined to retry Springsteen and Scott. But before doing so, they wanted to figure out who that mystery DNA belonged to. In 2009, with no matches, the charges against Springsteen and Scott were dropped. After nearly 10 years behind bars, they were released.
For years, officials kept trying to track down the source of the mystery DNA and finally there was a match this month, according to original investigator John Jones.
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