Authorities in Texas say that they have solved the 1991 killings known as the “Yogurt Shop Murders,” per , an ABC affiliate station in Austin. Genetic genealogy evidence was reportedly used to connect American serial killer Robert Eugene Brashers — who died by suicide in 1999 — to the crime.
Prior to finding a connection to the Yogurt Shop Murders case, Brashers’ DNA had already tied him to three other violent crimes: a 1990 killing in South Carolina, the 1997 sexual assault of a teenager in Tennessee, and a 1998 double homicide in Missouri involving a mother and her 12-year-old daughter.
On Dec. 6, 1991, four teenage girls — Jennifer Harbison, 17; Sarah Harbison, 15; Eliza Thomas, 17; and Amy Ayers, 13 — were found dead in the I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! shop in Austin. The girls were tied up and shot before the shop was set on fire. Little evidence was found at the scene, and the case went cold until 1999, when four men — Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Maurice Pierce and Forrest Welborn, only teenagers themselves at the time of the crime — were arrested and charged with the murders, per .
Springsteen and Scott confessed to the killings in 1999, but then recanted, claiming their confessions were coerced. The 1999 charges against Pierce, who was initially arrested just days after the murders for carrying a gun that matched the type used in the crime, were dropped in 2003 after prosecutors admitted they lacked enough evidence to convict. Welborn was never indicted after two grand juries declined to charge him.
Springsteen and Scott’s convictions were ultimately overturned on appeal. After spending a decade in prison, they were released in 2009, when it was confirmed that DNA evidence from the crime scene did not match either man.
The murders were recently the subject of Margaret Brown’s , which debuted this summer.
