Shell Casings and DNA on Fingernails Helped Crack ‘Yogurt Shop’ Murder Case

More than three decades after four teenage girls were found bound, gagged and murdered inside a frozen yogurt shop in Austin, Texas, investigators and officials on Monday described years of relentless, old-fashioned detective work and advances in DNA technology that finally led them to a suspect.

Detectives processed hundreds of DNA tests and sorted through thousands of tips. Shell casings were examined and more than a dozen forensic laboratories were consulted. Samples that would help unlock the case were taken from fingernails, an ice cream scoop and a belt buckle. Crimes in other states, including Tennessee, Kentucky and South Carolina, were reviewed for possible links.

Last week, officials announced a breakthrough: They had identified a man, Robert Eugene Brashers, who they said was responsible for the murders, which had baffled detectives and haunted Texas’s capital city since 1991.

At a news conference on Monday, which relatives of the victims attended, officials said they were still investigating elements of the case, which came to be known as the yogurt shop murders. Mr. Brashers died in 1999, days after shooting himself during a standoff with the police in Missouri. He was 40 years old.

Mayor Kirk Watson of Austin said the identification of Mr. Brashers as the suspect was a “significant breakthrough” in the decades-long effort to solve a “horrible crime” that he said changed the city forever.

Austin’s police chief, Lisa Davis, called it one of the most “devastating” and “haunting” cases in the city’s history. The only physical evidence recovered from the yogurt shop has been matched to Mr. Brashers, who she said was connected to other murders and sexual assaults across the country.

On the night of Dec. 6, 1991, Eliza Thomas and Jennifer Harbison, both 17, were working at an I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! store on a commercial street in Austin. It was a place Detective Daniel Jackson, who has worked on the cold case since 2022, described as an “everyday, Middle-America retail space in a strip mall.”

A friend, Amy Ayers, 13, and Jennifer’s 15-year-old sister, Sarah, dropped by. Around closing time, Mr. Brashers showed up. He remained there when there was no one else in the store, Detective Jackson said.

The bodies of the four teenagers were discovered the next morning when firefighters were dispatched to the shop to put out a fire that had been set with lighter fluid. The girls had been tied up with their clothes and shot in the head with a .22 caliber pistol. Amy was also shot with a .380 pistol.

At least two of them had been sexually assaulted. Three bodies were dumped in a back room covered with Styrofoam cups.

The police chased down thousands of leads, but for years, the investigation went nowhere. Physical evidence had been lost in the fire, and although a small amount of DNA evidence was taken from the girls’ bodies, DNA technology at the time was “primitive at best,” Detective Jackson said.

In 1999, a task force led by the Austin Police Department arrested four men who were teenagers at the time of the murders and had been previously questioned and released. Two of them were later tried and convicted.

In 2007, an appeals court ordered new trials because prosecutors, with no physical evidence to present, introduced videotaped statements instead. To prepare for the new trial, new tests on the DNA samples from the body of Ms. Ayers were conducted.

Detective Jackson said advances in forensic science meant they could use a previously unavailable technology called Y-STR testing, which is used in sexual assault investigations and identifies male DNA by targeting the Y chromosome. Investigators were able to get a profile that excluded the four men who had been arrested, and the charges were dropped, he said.

This year, DNA samples and ballistic casings that had been collected as evidence earlier in the investigation were resubmitted, at Detective Jackson’s urging, to national databases for genealogy and identifying weapons.

In July, a shell casing was traced to a weapon that had been used in an unsolved murder in Kentucky, he said. That crime had similar details to the yogurt shop killings, he said.

And Detective Jackson began working with investigators nationwide. Investigators in South Carolina told him they had a profile match connected to a 1990 sexual assault and murder case in Greenville.

It was Mr. Brashers.

Some of the material that was resubmitted for tests had been taken from a belt buckle and an ice cream scoop, and from Amy’s fingernails, he said.

“Amy’s final moments were to solve this case for us because of her fighting back,” Detective Jackson said.

There was no evidence that Mr. Brashers had an accomplice, he said. The Travis County district attorney, Jose Garza, said the “overwhelming weight of the evidence points to the guilt of one man and to the innocence of four.”

At the news conference on Monday, the families of the girls fought back tears and, one by one, thanked the investigators and officials for their unwavering support over the decades.

Sonora Thomas, whose sister Eliza was killed on that December night in 1991, said she had thought that she would die without ever knowing who had murdered her sister.

“I now know what happened, and that does ease my suffering,” she said.

Angie Ayers, addressing her sister-in-law Amy directly, said: “I am so honored to have fought next to you. But you can rest easy now, sister. I have got it from here.”