CASE UPDATE: In September 2025, the Austin Police Division known Robert Eugene Brashers, a serial killer and rapist, because the suspect within the Yogurt Store murders. Brashers, who’s deceased, was once tied to the murders via DNA checking out. In December 2025, the Travis County D.A.’s place of job filed a movement to start the method of exonerating the 4 males who had been wrongfully accused of the murders.
“48 Hours” correspondent Erin Moriarty has realized a suspect has been known within the 1991 murders of 4 teenage ladies in an Austin, Texas, yogurt store. That is in keeping with some of the authentic investigators who labored the case.
That suspect is Robert Eugene Brashers, who’s deceased, says retired Austin detective John Jones.
Brashers is a serial killer and rapist who dedicated no less than 3 murders between 1990 and 1998 within the states of South Carolina and Missouri. He died in January 1999 by way of suicide right through a standoff with police. The gun he used to shoot himself is assumed to be in line with a bullet casing present in a drain throughout the yogurt store, says Jones.
The relationship between Brashers and the case was once made via DNA, Jones informed Moriarty.
Moriarty has reported at the yogurt store case because the very starting.
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, had been discovered gagged, tied up with their very own clothes, and shot within the head in an I Cannot Consider It is Yogurt! store in Austin. The individual accountable had additionally set the store on hearth, compromising a lot of the proof.
Eliza and Jennifer were running on the yogurt store that evening. They had been on the point of shut when Jennifer’s sister, Sarah, and their pal, Amy, met them there to move house.
Missouri State Freeway Patrol by way of AP 
Following the crime, the Austin Police Division advanced a job power devoted only to fixing the case. Govt businesses, together with the FBI, had been known as in to lend a hand, however the case in the end went chilly till 1999, when 4 males, Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Maurice Pierce and Forrest Welborn, had been arrested and charged with the murders.’
The lads had been best youngsters on the time of the crime. They had been first wondered simply days after the murders when certainly one of them, Maurice Pierce, was once arrested at a mall now not a long way from the yogurt store with a .22 caliber gun — some of the similar forms of guns believed to had been used within the killings.
All 4 had been launched again then for loss of proof, however in 1999, when a brand new group of investigators had been tasked with taking a recent have a look at the outdated case, they got confessions from two of the 4 males, Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott. The ones confessions would later be known as into query after the 2 recanted, announcing they had been coerced.
Fees had been in the end dropped towards Maurice Pierce and Forrest Welborn because of loss of proof, and Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott had been the one two to head on trial. The only real proof towards them had been their very own phrases. They had been each convicted, however a couple of years later, their convictions had been overturned on constitutional grounds. The 6th Modification offers defendants the best to confront accusers and in Scott and Springsteen’s trials, their confessions had been used towards one any other, however they were not allowed to query every different in courtroom.
Rosemary Lehmberg, the Travis County, Texas, district lawyer on the time, was once intent on retrying Springsteen and Scott. However sooner than doing so, her place of job determined to make the most of what was once then a quite new form of DNA checking out known as Y-STR checking out. It was once some way of looking for and extracting male DNA best. Y-STR checking out was once ordered on vaginal swabs taken from the sufferers on the time of the murders. By way of this level, investigators had come to imagine that no less than some of the sufferers were sexually assaulted. Because of the Y-STR checking out, a partial male DNA profile was once got from some of the ladies, however to the wonder of the district lawyer’s place of job, the DNA pattern didn’t fit any of the 4 males who had been arrested.
Nonetheless, prosecutors had been decided to retry Springsteen and Scott. However sooner than doing so, they sought after to determine who that thriller DNA belonged to. In 2009, without a fits, the fees towards Springsteen and Scott had been dropped. After just about 10 years at the back of bars, they had been launched.
For years, officers saved seeking to monitor down the supply of the thriller DNA and in spite of everything there was once a fit this month, in keeping with authentic investigator John Jones.
